Norway Chess Starts Today (Tuesday); Carlsen Crushes the Field in Pre-Tournament Blitz
The Norway Chess tournament gets underway today (Tuesday) with an elite field of 10 players that includes the world champion (Magnus Carlsen), the two previous world champions (Viswanathan Anand and Vladimir Kramnik), three world #2 players (the current one, Wesley So, and erstwhile consistent #2s Fabiano Caruana and Levon Aronian), last year's world championship runner-up and the current world blitz champion (Sergey Karjakin), plus a pair of former (and quite possibly future) 2800s (Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and Anish Giri).
As is common (but not universal) nowadays, tournament pairings were set based on results in a pre-tournament blitz competition. Carlsen started out with draws against Nakamura and Anand, and nearly ran the table after that, giving up a draw to Kramnik in round 7 and beating everyone else. His score of 7.5/9 put him two points clear of Nakamura and Aronian, with Vachier-Lagrave alone in fourth with 5 points. Kramnik and Karjakin tied for the critical fifth spot (the top five finishers get an extra game with the white pieces in the main event), and Kramnik got it on tiebreaks by defeating Karjakin in the last round. Both finished with 50% - a good result for Kramnik, who was winless and -2 after five rounds. After Karjakin, Anand and So finished with 4 points apiece, Caruana with 3 and a winless Giri lost his last five games to finish last with 1.5 points.
The games and the blitz tournament video can be accessed here (for now). Here are the pairings for round 1 of the main event:
- Carlsen - So
- Nakamura - Giri
- Aronian - Caruana
- Vachier-Lagrave - Anand
- Kramnik - Karjakin
The world's #1 vs. the world's #2: not a bad way to start the tournament! The action begins at 10 a.m. ET = 4 p.m. local time in Norway = 3 p.m. CET.
Predictions? I've been going with So lately, but Carlsen has been beating him lately and seems strongly motivated, so I'm going with the champ this time around.
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