The inaugural season of the Grand Chess Tour concludes this month with the London Chess Classic. As with the Norway Chess and Sinquefield Cup legs earlier this year, the nine "official" tour members will once again compete, along with a tenth (Mickey Adams) chosen by the organizer. As the pairings have already been set, I'll list the players and their ratings in the course of giving the round 1 matchups:
Who will win? Carlsen's results have been very poor this year (by his standards, obviously), while Topalov, Anand, Aronian, Nakamura, Caruana and Giri have all had reasons to feel optimistic based on their performances in 2015. (MVL has been on an uptick lately as well; so on paper only Grischuk and Adams count as outsiders - theoretically speaking. But a case can be made for them as well: it wasn't so long ago that Grischuk was over 2800, while Adams is a very reliable player with tons of experience in top-level chess and the benefit of playing in his home country.)
I have no idea whatsoever as to who to pick, so I'll forego the possibility of bragging about my correct predictions at the end of the tournament. I'll leave the prognostications to all of you! One thing you might want to keep in mind is that the Candidates' tournament isn't that far away, so it's already possible that some of the players will be keeping their best material under wraps. (Topalov, Anand, Nakamura, Aronian, Caruana and Giri are all participating in the Candidates.)