2016 Champions Showdown in St. Louis
There is that little match in New York coming up, it's true, but in St. Louis there will be a very strong and entertaining event overlapping for part of the world championship match. The 2016 Champions Showdown in St. Louis runs from November 10-14, a three-stage tournament featuring Fabiano Caruana, Viswanathan Anand, Hikaru Nakamura, and Veselin Topalov. The first three days are for a classical round robin, day four will feature a double round robin with a rapid time control, and the last day will be a quadruple round robin in blitz.
It'll be a great few weeks for chess fans - especially in the United States. (Apologies to European readers and others who will stay awake to crazy hours of the morning following all the action.)
Reader Comments (1)
The St. Louis tournament site doesn't mention precise time control(s), but the classical one seems to be pretty fast: two games per day scheduled at 1:00PM and 3:30PM local time (7 hours difference with Central Europe) - together in three days a doube round robin. This also means that European chess fans (at least Central Europe, Moscow is another story) won't have to stay up well beyond midnight: world championship games in New York start at 1:00PM local time (6 hours difference with Central Europe) - early start reportedly to please Norwegian TV (still not really early enough for Russian TV).
For Americans needing a morning chess fix and for anyone who can't wait until the events in New York and St. Louis kick off: There's also the European Club Cup starting tomorrow in Novi Sad, Serbia (rounds at 3:00PM local time, six hours behind New York). Players migrate between teams: Giri now for Siberia (SOCAR Azerbaijan is absent), Aronian and Gelfand for the Italian OR Padova (replacing Karjakin and Nakamura), Shirov played for seven different teams over the last eight years (three Russian ones, SOCAR, Baden-Baden from Germany, Zurich and now the Czech Novy Bor), ... .
In any case, only three top20 players won't play chess in November: Nepomniachtchi and Mamedyarov because they are on team Karjakin, Wesley So for (as far as I am concerned) unknown reasons.