The "2020" Candidates finally begins its second leg today, Monday, April 19, 2021--great news for chess fans, and more importantly a hopeful sign that one more aspect of life is on its way back to normal. (The older I get, the more I realize that there isn't any such thing, but only the way things were five minutes before the latest crisis, major innovation, social upheaval, war or other calamity or life-changing event. But to use an old phrase that's depressing if one reflects on it, using "normal" in a loose and popular sense is good enough for government work. Speaking of "normal", having parentheticals that are three times as long as what purports to be the main paragraph is not normal, so let's get back to the point of the post, shall we?)
When things left off last year, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and Ian Nepomniachtchi were tied for first, sort of. They have the same score - 4.5/7 after the first of two cycles - but the final game of that cycle saw MVL beat Nepo. A playoff is possible, but only if the players are level after all the tiebreaks. That is not the case here, as the first tiebreaker is head-to-head, so it might be useful to think of Vachier-Lagrave as having a 1/4 point lead over Nepomniachtchi.
The co-leaders (or whatever we want to call them) are a full point ahead of the next four players, with Fabiano Caruana, Alexander Grischuk, Anish Giri, and Wang Hao all on 50% with 3.5/7. Bringing up the rear are Kirill Alekseenko (whose qualification was a surprise, and who doesn't seem to have made much news over the past year, either) and Ding Liren with 2.5 points apiece. Place your (metaphorical) bets now: who do you think will win? I picked Caruana (of course) before the event started; at this point, I have no idea what to think, as the players may have forgotten by now how to play slow chess. We'll see. Anyway, here are the pairings for round 8:
The action starts at 4 p.m. (16:00) local time in Ekaterinburg, Russia, which is 7 a.m. ET in the US of A. Bad luck for those of watching in the New World, or maybe good luck - it means we won't lose 4-5 hours of productivity per day. Be sure to tune in each day (excepting this coming Thursday and Sunday, which are rest days), as I will be covering the event.