Grand Prix chess tournaments
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Grand Prix chess tournaments are tournaments for prize money rated by the United States Chess Federation. In general, a tournament must have at least $300 in guaranteed prizes to award "Grand Prix" points.
At the end of the year, prizes are awarded to players with the most points. The first prize is usually $10,000.
These prizes provide incentives to grandmasters to play in small regional tournaments which they would otherwise avoid.
The Grand Prix of chess was started in the 1980s by Church's Fried Chicken. As a result, the points awarded at these tournaments were called "chicken points" and the tournaments at which these points were awarded was called the "Chicken circuit".
As years passed, the sponsorship has changed. For several years the sponsor was Novag, a maker of chess computers. Currently, the sponsor is ChessCafe.
The late Grandmaster Igor V. Ivanov won the Grand Prix of chess nine times. In recent years, the usual winner has been the late Grandmaster Aleksander Wojtkiewicz.
