Bilbao Chess Masters Final

The GSCA was established on 17 January 2007 and the first edition of the series for 2008 announced in May, with Mexico City added to the list and Bilbao confirmed as Masters Final hosts.

[3] On 16 March 2009, the members of the GSCA Presidential Board was published, confirming the addition of Pearl Spring in Nanjing, China as Grand Slam hosts as well as interest from San Luis, Argentina and London.

[5] At the end of the 2012 edition of Tata Steel the rest of the 2012 series was confirmed and announced that the 2011 winners of Tal Memorial and London Chess Classic qualified for the 2012 Bilbao Final.

[14] Qualifiers for the Final were Carlsen (winner of Corus, Bazna Kings and Pearl Springs events) and Anand who was seeded through due to the cancellation of M-Tel Masters that year.

A tournament was held in Shanghai, China consisting of Kramnik, Aronian, Shirov and Wang Hao in order to fill the two spots.

In contrast to Grand Slam Masters Finals in the last years, the organizers decided to return to a six-player double round robin without a special qualification tournament.

Kramnik, the winner of the 2010 Final, and Karjakin, second at Bazna - declined to play and were replaced by Ivanchuk and local player Francisco Vallejo Pons.

The sixth Grand Slam Chess Masters final was held on 7–12 October in Bilbao as a double round robin with four players.

The ninth Bilbao Masters Final was held on 13–23 July as a six-player double round-robin with Magnus Carlsen, Hikaru Nakamura, Anish Giri, Sergey Karjakin, Wesley So and Wei Yi taking part.