YEREVAN, JANUARY 13, NOYAN TAPAN. According to the Chess International Federation, the World Chess Champioship will be held by new contest rules. According to this, the champion will be decided by few stages in 2007. And before this, 16 chess players 10 of who were chosen at the world cup tournamnet held in Khanti Mansiysk, will hold pretenders' contests. The Chess World Federation made public the list of 8 pairs of pretenders. The pairs were decided according to the chess players' personal rate. Levon Aronian (Armenia) - Magnus Karlsen (Norway), Peter Lecko (Hungary) - Mikhayil Gurevich (Turkey), Ruslan Ponomaryov (Ukraine) - Sergey Rublevski (Russia), Boris Gelfand (Israel) - Rustam Kasimjanov (Uzbekistan), Ethien Backro (France) - Gatta Kamski (USA), Alexander Grishchuk (Russia) - Vladimir Malakhov (Russia), Hudit Polgar (Hungary) - Yevgeni Bareev (Russia), Alexey Shirov (Spain) - Michail Adams (England) pairs will compete at the 1st stage. Winners, dividing into pairs, will hold new contests and decide the best 4 players. At this stage all the contests will consist of 6 games. Pretenders' contests, in all probability, will be held during 2006. The place and terms of the contests will be known soon. 4 winners of the pretenders' contests then will play with the best 4 players of the previous world championship: Vesselin Topalov (Bulgaria), Wishwanatan Anand (India), Peter Svidler and Alexander Morozevich (both from Russia) and in the 2 stages tournament to be held in 2007 will find out the world champion.

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