Montréal Open 2026

On the Friday night, around 9pm, I had a slightly absurd thought: what if nobody comes? By 9am on Saturday, 260 players were sitting at their boards. Out in the corridors were their parents, their brothers and sisters, their grandparents, their coaches, and at least one dog who had asked for none of this. Close to 500 people across three days.

This is exactly why we do it. An eight-year-old and an international master passing each other on the same staircase, and nobody panics. Kids beating adults who had looked very sure of themselves at 9am. A young player watching board one and thinking, me too. That is where careers start.

On the top boards, cathedral silence. Just behind the door, a small crowd whispering and putting the world to rights. And at the end: trophies, a microphone, hands shaking, photographs with giant pieces. Chess does not need explaining to be a spectacle. It needs showing.

For a generation said to be incapable of putting the phone down for thirty seconds: 260 people put theirs away for an entire weekend. Voluntarily. For a game 1,500 years old. If you are looking for real attention, it was in that room.

I had a line ready for the microphone. Every year Montréal rolls out the carpet for Formula 1: the cars, the noise, a whole city stopping. And what do they wave at the finish? A chequered board. The chequered flag is our chessboard. They stole our flag. We would just like the weekend that goes with it.

The rest played out like an episode of Community: students in the middle of an election campaign, an organizer running around with extension cords, a grandmaster hunting for oat milk, and two strictly identical sandwiches nobody could tell apart. Several players ate both, just to be safe.

None of it stands up without the frame. Collège Stanislas made us feel at home rather than tolerated in a gymnasium. The staff, the security team, the students, the student association, the Prospero café, the volunteers: they made simple what could easily have been complicated. A picture without a frame ends up creased.

There were rough edges, and you saw them. We wrote them down. But this was the first large tournament powered by ChessPass, our own platform: registrations, ratings, pairings, live results, automatic refunds. All of it ran under the hood while you played on top of it. We can execute, and now we have the tools to do it bigger.