St. Louis is the entertainment capital of the chess world, and their latest offering is a new edition of the Champions Showdown. It is a vehicle for the United States's Big Three, and in addition there's the biggest of the big: the World Champion. Each of the four - champ Magnus Carlsen, Fabiano Caruana, Wesley So, and Hikaru Nakamura - will play 30 games, and none against each other. Instead, they are matched up as follows:
The first three matches start tomorrow/today (Thursday) at 1 p.m. local time (= 2 p.m. ET), while the last one starts on Saturday. Correspondingly, the first three matches end on Sunday, while Carlsen and Ding will keep us entertained through Tuesday.
The time controls will drop as the matches go on: Day 1 will see four g/30s, day 2 six g/20s, day 3 offers eight g/10s, and the final day will have 12 five-minute games.
Each match has its own $100,000 prize fund, with a 60-40 split for the winner and loser, respectively.
Predictions? I expect Carlsen to win his match comfortably, Nakamura to crush Topalov, and Grischuk to defeat Caruana. So-Dominguez feels like a coin flip to me, but I'll trust So to play enough like his peak self of 2016 to pull it off.