This gigantic 128-player knockout event starts in just a few hours today, Sunday, September 3, in Tbilisi, Georgia. The tournament is insanely strong, with 33 of the top 35 players participating - only Veselin Topalov (#16) and Leinier Dominguez (#23) are absent.
Although the event is primarily a qualifier for next year's Candidates tournament, and although the Candidates is the event that selects the player who will challenge the world champion in the next Championship match, Magnus Carlsen - the world champion - and Sergey Karjakin - who has already qualified for the Candidates - are both playing. This is odd at best and inappropriate at worst, but the fault is FIDE's for allowing it, not Carlsen's and Karjakin's for taking advantage of it.
The format is as follows: the 128 players are seeded by rating, and in the first round #1 (Carlsen) plays #128, #2 plays #127, and so on until #64 and #65 play. (The full bracket is here; tournament website here.) Seven knockout rounds are necessary to produce a clear winner (just as in tennis's Grand Slam tournaments). The first six rounds start with a pair of classical games, one per day, with rapid and (if necessary) blitz games on the third day in case the classical games finish in a 1-1 tie. The final match will be a best-of-four.
The play starts at 3 p.m. local time in Tbilisi, which is 7 a.m. ET in the U.S.
Speaking of the U.S., we are very well represented. What follows is the player's seed, his name, his rating (at least the rating as of the moment when the seeding was fixed), his opponent, and his opponent's rating:
2. Wesley So (2810) vs. Joshua Daniel Ruiz Castillo (2377)
3. Fabiano Caruana (2807) vs. Kenny Solomon (2398)
7. Hikaru Nakamura (2792) vs. Abdullah Al-Rakib (2454)
48. Alexander Onischuk (2682) vs. Yaroslav Zherebukh (2627) - Unfortunately.
55. Varuzhan Akobian (2662) vs. Anton Kovalyov (2641)
77. Jeffery Xiong (2633) vs. Alexander Motylev (2675)
81. Yaroslav Zherebukh (2627) vs. Alexander Onischuk (2682) - Again, unfortunately.
83. Samuel Sevian (2620) vs. Liviu-Dieter Nisipeanu (2687)
104. Aleksandr Lenderman (2565) vs. Pavel Eljanov (2734)