The tournament consists of 6 rounds: the first 5 rounds determine the winner of each block、and then the two block winners meet in Round 6 for the tournament championship. The reigning title holder and runner-up as well as a select number of other players are awarded first round byes, thus actually only needing to win 5 games in order to win the tournament. The basic time control for each game is 30 seconds per move. In addition, each player has 10 periods of extra thinking time, 1 minute each.