A couple of things have happened since the last chess update, with a winner emerging from both Superbet Rapid & Blitz in Romania and a winner of the Hamburg FIDE Grand Prix. Let’s take a look at the upcoming events and how these results have affected the overall standings (concerning Grand Chess Tour and the 2 spots to Candidates).
Grand Chess Tour: Tata Steel rapid & blitz
This week the final event (before the grand final in London) of the Grand Chess Tour begins in Kolkata India. The Superbet rapid & blitz that was held in the beginning of the month ended with Aronian and Karjakin in joint first, both scoring 11 GCT points. These results gives us the following standing before things kick off in India;
For Karjakin the joint win was not enough as he has played his 5 events and can’t break into the top 4 (who will travel to London for the final). It is also highly unlikely MVL will get there, as Anand just needs 5 points (middle of the pack finish) on home turf to surpass him (and Aronian will pass him by just showing up).
The tournament in Kolkata begins on November 22, where the players will play three rapid games per day (November 22 to 24) before moving on to the 18 blitz games (9 on 25. and 9 on 26.). The venue will be the National Library in Kolkata with games beginning 14:00 (local time) expect the final day when play begins in 13:00.
In Kolkata we will see the following players; Magnus Carlsen, Ding Liren, Levon Aronian, Vishy Anand, Wesley So, Ian Nepomniachtchi, Anish Giri and Hikaru Nakamura, with local players Pentala Harikrishna and Vidit Gujrathi being the wildcards. In Romania the wildcards had some impressive days, but they hadn’t the consistency to get a top finish in the end. Will Vidit and Harikrishna prove otherwise?
It will also be interesting to see if Carlsen has shaken off his poor rapid and blitz performance in St. Louis (and loss to So in Fischer Random) or if he’s still unusually shaky in these time controls. Wesley So who impressed yesterday by beating MVL in the Chess.com Speed Chess championship 17 – 15 is perhaps a small favourite. If So wins clear first he also has a shot at reaching the London final, with a score of 39 he only needs to keep Anand scoring 6 or less points.
FIDE Grand Prix
Alexander Grischuk had a great tournament and ended up winning the event in Hamburg defeating Duda in the final. This also catapulted him into an excellent position to get one of the two qualifying spots to the candidates. With 1 stop left (Tel Aviv between December 11 to 23) Grischuk is leading with 20 points, well ahead MVL with 13 points, Mamedyarov with 10 and Nepomniachtchi with 9 points. The only other players with a mathematically shot is Wojtaszek with 5 and So with 4 (they can only surpass MVL, not Grischuk).
Grischuk isn’t playing in Tel Aviv, and while he is currently in a clear leading he still has to sweat the other players. If Mamedyarov or Nepomniachtchi wins in Tel Aviv (and get enough bonus points) they will pass him (they both have better tiebreaking by ending up with two grand prix wins) and if MVL reaches the final with a couple of bonus points (he scored 3+2 points in Hamburg) he also will pass Grischuk. On the other hand, the pairings could turn out in a way Grischuk will qualify before even a move is played in Tel Aviv.
As things stand I bet/hope MVL will scrape through and join Grischuk in the candidates. If that will happen we will have the following players playing in the candidates; Caruana, Wang Hao, Ding Liren, Radjabov, Giri, Grischuk & MVL. As the event will be held in Yekaterinburg it wouldn’t be surprising a russian gets the wildcard, and currently Nepomniachtchi is perhaps the most likely candidate.
In other chess news
Just to end this post with a few other tidbits of chess news. Carlsen has played another league match for his Norwegian chess club, winning and extending his streak to 103 classic games undefeated. He also has withdrawn his membership at the Norwegian Chess Federation, but this is purely a symbolic gesture, he can still play league matches and represent Norway in various events.
On November 12 Tata Steel announced its participants in the 2020 edition, and it will probably be the most exciting lineup you’ll see all year.
Headlined by Carlsen (in his 16th appearance in Wijk an Zee!), world #2 Caruana and local hero Anish Giri, the event also features some of the most exciting younger players like Duda, Artemiev, Firouzja, Dubov and Xiong.
The host for this year’s rapid and blitz world championship was also recently announced. Again the tournament is sponsored by King Salman/Saudi Arabia and again it will be held in Russia. Last year was St. Petersburg but in 2019 the players will travel to Moscow. The games will again be held over the Christmas between December 25 and 30.
Tabletop Cave 