Ambitious plans are afoot for the chess sections in the Mind Sports Olympiad. There will be no fewer than 13 different chess tournaments catering for all levels of play and all ages. In addition, many tournaments will be played under fast time limits, and are therefore ideal for those who are pushed for time.

Three events stand out as being different. The first is the final of the UK Schools’ Chess Challenge for individuals, organised by Michael Basman. For the past three years the final of this event has been held at the Olympiad, and this year the youngsters competing for the highest prizes have fought through from a record initial entry of 35,000 schoolchildren. This makes the "Basman tournament" the largest chess tournament in the world.

The pinnacle of the event’s chess competitions is represented by the Mind Sports Olympiad Masters. From l977 until 1994 Lloyds Bank organised an annual masters tournament in London. It attracted grandmasters worldwide as well as two former world champions - Vasily Smyslov and Boris Spassky. In 1981, I had the honour of winning it myself. For the past five years the masters tournament has been defunct and the capital has languished without a flagship event.

Now the Mind Sports Olympiâd is due to change all that with a new masters tournament, capable of qualifying players not just for national and international ratings but for the highly coveted international master and grandmaster titles. There will be a prize fund of £10,000, and it is expected that at least 30 grandmasters will be competing - a strength in depth record for any UK chess tournament.

The grandmasters - such as Britain’s Murray Chandler, silver medallist from the World Chess Federation chess Olympiads - will be the obvious stars of this tournament. But at the junior end of the scale we hope to see players such as Murugan Thiruchelvam who, earlier this year at the age of ten, became the youngest player in the world ever to beat a grandmaster in a formal competition.

Another potential draw is 11-year-old Jessie Gilbert, from Croydon. By winning the Women’s World Amateur Championship at Hastings at the start of this year Jessie became possibly the youngest person to win a senior world championship in any competitive arena. Against opposition from 13 countries, she acquired the Women’s World Chess Federation Master title and an automatic rating of 2,050 - both age records for a British female chess player.

To recognise her achievement the Brain Trust charity, in concert with the Swedish health care and education giant Bure, awarded Jessie a £4,000 chess scholarship to America, where she studied with Edmar Mednis, the New York grandmaster, for a week.

The third event that is a little out of the ordinary is the Chess Problem- Solving Championship.

Try your hand at this puzzle set by the British Chess Society as the opening round of its own national championship. If you know the answer, why not enter the Mind Sports Olympiad Championship itself?

The author is chess correspondent for The Times.