Magnus Carlsen's second title defense, this time against Sergey Karjakin, starts this Friday at 2 p.m. local time (ET) at the South Street Seaport in New York.
It's a 12 game match (not counting tiebreaks, if necessary), and the schedule until the last round is this: a game one day, a game the next day, and then a day off. This continues until the very last round, which has one extra day off beforehand. Players will alternate colors the first six games, and then everything gets switched. Specifically, the pairings have been set and Carlsen has White in game 1. He will therefore also have White in games 3 and 5, but then in the second half it will be Karjakin who starts each game pair with White, so Carlsen will next play White in game 8.
There's a report on the opening ceremony (with video) here and the official site is here, but let's get to the question we all want to answer: what's going to be the margin of Carlsen's victory? I'm going for +2, 6.5-4.5.