Grand Prix points were then allocated according to each player's standing in the tournament, as shown in the table below.

[2] In an interview with Chessdom (Aug 2016), Zurab Azmaiparashvili (president of the European Chess Union) indicated various plusses and minuses with the new system, particularly that the nine "wild card" entries were less expensive than in previous versions.

Players who held an entry spot but did not enter the Grand Prix were: Magnus Carlsen and Sergey Karjakin from the World Chess Championship 2016, Fabiano Caruana, Viswanathan Anand, Veselin Topalov, Vladimir Kramnik, Wesley So from the rating list.

With the objective of determining qualifiers to play in the Candidates 2018, and in the case that two or more players have equal cumulative points at the top, the following criteria were utilized to decide the overall Series winner and other overall placings:[7] Originally the first event was to take place in October 2016, but this has been moved to November 2017, with the other dates mostly the same.

[citation needed] The notation in the crosstable is the number of the opponent, color of pieces, and score.

For example, in the top-left hand corner of the Sharjah 2017 crosstable, 16w½ indicates that in round 1, Grischuk played player 16 (Jon Ludvig Hammer) with the white pieces, and the game ended in a draw.