World Corporate Chess Championship will crown ‘the smartest company in the world’
The fierce rivalry between technology and finance geniuses will come to a head this weekend in the finals of a corporate chess tournament that includes teams from some of the world’s biggest companies.
Organized by the World Chess Federation, or Fédération Internationale des Échecs (FIDE), the finals in New York City this weekend will pit some of the best players from Google, Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs against nine other companies from the U.S. and abroad. to crown “the smartest company in the world”.
The FIDE Corporate World Chess Championship will begin with each team of four, plus an alternate, competing in a 10-round group stage on June 15th and 16th until the top four teams move on to the semi-finals. The last two teams will face each other on June 17th for the title.
The tournament aims to highlight how the strategic mindset required for chess intersects with decision-making in the corporate world, said FIDE press officer Milan Dinic. Fortune.
“Chess and business share many overlapping concepts, such as strategy, risk management and resource management,” Dinic said in an email. “The idea of the championship is to explore and deepen the connections between chess and the business world.”
These connections are clear to Igor Shneider, Deutsche Bank’s vice president in the Financial Institutions Group and FIDE (FM) master on the bank’s chess team.
“Deutsche Bank has always supported us in this type of competition as they appreciate the strategic nature of the game,” said Shneider. Fortune in an email. “Chess cultivates more strategic thinking and collaboration across the organization, which Deutsche Bank and clients appreciate.”
Although many newcomers began playing during the pandemic following the release of Netflix’s “The Queen’s Gambit,” Shneider said chess has always played a special role in his life. Growing up, he traveled internationally to represent the U.S. in tournaments and said he sees chess as “the great equalizer” that can bring people from different backgrounds together. But this weekend, Deutsche Bank’s team of former competitive players, including three chess masters and a former US women’s chess champion, has its eyes on the prize.
“We are very excited to represent Deutsche Bank in this competition and it would be very special if we could become world champions,” he said.
Google team captain Kola Adeyemi is the product strategy and operations lead for Google Workspace and learned the game from his uncle at the age of eight in Lagos, Nigeria. Although he is a competitive player rated around 2,000 by international FIDE standards—his rating of 2,336 under classical time controls makes him a National Master, according to the U.S. Chess Federation—he still enjoys playing with the locals. cruel scenes in Bryant Park, New York. .
Adeyimi said Google has an active chess community with about 2,500 people on its email list. Google employees around the world often play against each other in online tournaments, he said. Some of them are even Grandmasters (GM) and International Masters (IM), which by FIDE standards places them among the best players in the world, he added.
Google team members will certainly give their all in this weekend’s tournament, Adeyemi said, but the question of whether people in technology or finance are smarter is far from the priority.
“People aren’t playing this because they’re getting some kind of prize money or stuff like that, they’re just playing it because they love the game,” he said. Fortune.
