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Ambar Chatterjee

International Matters

ICCF Achievements

Here are the recent ICCF norms and titles achieved by AIWCF players: The following titles were already reported:

ICCF Congress 2026

The next ICCF Congress will be held in Neuhardenberg, Germany from 11th to 14th October 2026 with the following schedule:

ItemDate
Executive Board Meeting11 October 2026
Congress - Day 112 October 2026
Congress - Day 213 October 2026
Congress - Day 3
(if required)		14 October 2026

Medals:

The following players from India are proud recepients of medals at the Neuhardenberg Congress. This includes players who were awarded the title this year and also last year. Players can attend the Congress to recieve their medal otherwise we will send it to your home address.

PlayerICCF IdTitleYear
Kumar, Pavan Tumuluri280138SIM2026
Gupta, Aniruddha Dutta280179SIM2026
Srinath, Tanmay280824SIM2025
De, Gautam280088IM2026
Kapoor, Lalit 280113IM2026
Roy, Rabirashmi281147IM2026
Saxena, Alok280168IM2026
Sengupta, Arnab280192IM2026
Srinath, Tanmay280824 IM2025
Turaga, Mohan280224IM2025
Gupta, Aniruddha Dutta280179IM2025

The following players were awarded CCM and CCE titles during 2025-2026. ICCF no longer awards medals for these titles. However AIWCF has decided to arrange medals for them also.

PlayerICCF IdTitleYear
Agrawal, Rakesh280319CCM2025
Bhattacharjee, Sumeet281560CCM2026
Dubey, Pankaj281719CCM2026
Dubey, Pankaj281719CCE2026

Excursions and Events:

DateTimeEvent
October 116:00 PMCultural welcome at the Schinkel Church
October 118:00 PM - 10:00 PMWelcome Ceremony
October 127:00 PM - 10:00 PMBlitz Tournament in the Hangar, Neuhardenberg Airfield
October 139:30 AM - 5:00 PMDay trip to the Oderbruch region - accompanying persons
October 137:00 PM - 10:00 PMTeam comparison of Berlin's top teams
October 149:30 AM - 5:00 PMDay trip for delegates to Berlin
October 146:00 PM - 10:00 PMGraduation Ceremony

One of the important activities of Congress each year is to discuss and vote on proposals. Proposals from member federations were submitted during 1st March 2026 to 1st September 2026. Online voting opened on 14th September and India completed voting. To view the status of proposals you should log into ICCF server and look at ICCF Congresses.

Next year there will be elections for the Executive Board. Services Director, Austin Lockwood writes, "If there is anyone who might be interested in standing as a candidate for Services Director, I would be very happy to pass on my experience and work with that person or people over the next twelve months."

Among the important proposals this year are:

Proposal 2026-041: Modernising ICCF Website

Website technology, design standards, accessibility requirements, and user expectations have changed considerably over the past fifteen years, and the ICCF site is starting to show its age... we urgently need to modernise the website. Cost for this is shown as 75,000 Euro spread over 3 years.

Proposal 2026-042: New Chess Board for ICCF Website

The chessboard, used to display games and to enter moves and conditionals, dates back to the original playing site from 2004, more than two decades ago. Most of ICCF's competitors offer attractive, modern interactive chess boards with game replay, analysis features, responsive sizes, selectable colors and piece images, and many more features. In comparison, our chessboard seems to lack interactivity and usability. To attract new players, we need to offer a first-class interactive online experience. A one-time budget of up to 10,000 Euros is asked to develop a new interactive chessboard for the ICCF website.

India's Stand

India has voted against these two proposals on the grounds of the high cost shown. It is absolutely true that ICCF's website and chess board need a lot of improvement. But these changes, especially with the availability of AI tools can be done quite easily. A volunteer can re-design the site and chess board free of cost in a matter of days. Today AI tools like Claude-AI and ChatGPT can go through the existing site and generate a new stunning site in a matter of minutes. Many free and open source chess boards for chess servers are available which could be adapted. Even if the work is assigned to a professional a Global Tender would surely show a cost much less than the suggested budget allocation.

Austin Lockwood writes, "Our website is currently hosted on a virtual server in the United Kingdom. A more modern, more resilient, and more cost effective, approach would be to host the site on a cloud service such as Microsoft Azure. I am currently looking at the implications of making this change when the contract with our current provider expires".

AIWCF wishes all participants have a lively Congress at Neuhardenberg!