A brief lull in the chess world comes to an end today (Saturday) as the first of three noteworthy events gets underway. On Saturday, Wesley So and David Navara begin a four-game match. Both players have been in a little slump lately, but it's still an attractive battle between two fighting players well into the 2700s.
That will keep up occupied through the weekend, and then on Monday the Capablanca Memorial starts in Havana. The Elite Group is a six player double round robin, with five of the six players rated over 2700: Leinier Dominguez, Ian Nepomniachtchi, Dmitry Andreikin, Pavel Eljanov, Yu Yangyi and (in the upper 2600s) Lazaro Bruzon.
Finally, the piece de la resistance is the Norway Chess tournament, which starts with a blitz tournament on Monday (for pairing purposes) followed by the main, classical event on Tuesday. Ten players are competing, including the world's #s 1-9 players excluding Vladimir Kramnik (i.e. Magnus Carlsen, Fabiano Caruana, Viswanathan Anand, Hikaru Nakamura, Veselin Topalov, Alexander Grischuk, Levon Aronian and Anish Giri), plus Maxime Vachier-Lagrave (he was at or near the top ten when the invite was made, but has since plunged to #27 in the world rankings) and local qualifier Jon Ludwig Hammer (#62) in the world. It's at least slightly scandalous that Sergey Karjakin isn't playing, as he is the two-time defending champion of the event, but whether it's a bit of bad luck, a function of Garry Kasparov's distaste for Vladimir Putin (Karjakin is unfortunately a fan of the Russian President, but in this context, so what?) or the Norwegian organizers' lack of interest in inviting the player who has ruined Carlsen's home tournament the last couple of years (or some combination of the above), that's how it is.
Three great events to look forward to - and if that's not enough Dortmund starts immediately afterwards, featuring players from all three tournaments just listed, plus Kramnik and Arkadij Naiditsch. (Naiditsch will surely be on a rampage, looking to regain some points after a mind-blowingly bad performance in the French League where he lost 32 points.)