Nobody mentions, but Magnus Carlsen was one of the winners of Corona theater – he stays the World Chess Champion until it is decided who will be a challenger. And last year, FIDE Candidates tournament was split in a half for ‘health’ reasons. Today is the day of continuation…
The FIDE Candidates tournament 2020 resumes on April 19th 2021, in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg. If you haven’t heard for it yet, it’s an eight player, double round-robin system, which means each player plays all other players as white and as black. So, (I don’t mean Wesley) despite Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and Ian Nepomniachtchi are in the lead, we are still far from the decision:
Place
Name
Score
Rating
1
Vachier-Lagrave, Maxime
4.5/7
2758
2
Nepomniachtchi, Ian
4.5/7
2789
3
Caruana, Fabiano
3.5/7
2820
4
Giri, Anish
3.5/7
2776
5
Wang, Hao
3.5/7
2763
6
Grischuk, Alexander
3.5/7
2777
7
Ding, Liren
2.5/7
2791
8
Alekseenko, Kirill
2.5/7
2696
Now the time control: A hundred minutes for the first 40 moves, then 50 minutes for the next 20 moves, and then 15 minutes for the rest of the game, with a bonus of 30 seconds from the move one. The players cannot draw before move 40.
And now the nice surprise from chess24.com – Magnus Carlsen will be one of the commentators of this tournament!
He will have help from GM David Howell and IM Tania Sachdev to commentate on the second half of the 8-player event that decides his next World Championship Challenger!
