Saturday
Mar102018
2018 Grand Chess Tour: Events, (Some) Dates, and Participants are Set
Saturday, March 10, 2018 at 11:48PM
All the details are here. Magnus Carlsen declined his invitation this year, and Vladimir Kramnik did too (as usual). Six of the Candidates did sign up, however: Shakhriyar Mamedyarov, Fabiano Caruana, Levon Aronian, Wesley So, Alexander Grischuk, and Sergey Karjakin; additionally, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Viswanathan Anand, and Hikaru Nakamura are joining the party. Kramnik will be a wildcard in Paris, and Anish Giri will participate as a wildcard in Leuven. As for the two St. Louis events, the wildcard remains open. Maybe someone with the initials G.K. will perform an encore?
tagged 2018 Grand Chess Tour
Reader Comments (1)
Any idea why Kramnik doesn’t like to participate? Is it the travel to the Western Hemisphere? I recall the pianist Richter preferred not to visit the US.
[DM: I'm not sure. Anyone else? He did play in the FIDE K.O. World Championship Las Vegas in 1999 (I especially remember watching his mini-match with Korchnoi from about 10 feet away), and he was in New York helping Kasparov during the latter's match with Anand at the World Trade Center (I was there for that one too). So he has been here. Maybe he doesn't want to deal with the jet lag?]