Piling On, Or Just An Observation?
A tweet from 2700chess:
Four decisive games today! During WCC match Anand - Gelfand we saw only 3 decisive games including tie-breaks.
Ouch.
A tweet from 2700chess:
Four decisive games today! During WCC match Anand - Gelfand we saw only 3 decisive games including tie-breaks.
Ouch.
As mentioned in the last post, the players with White this round were those who finished in the top half of the table. It's only one round in, obviously, but so far yesterday's results correlate with today's. Vladimir Kramnik drew easily with Black against Magnus Carlsen and was close to a win, but in the other four games Weaver Adams was right: White to play and win.
Levon Aronian benefited more from an exchange of errors against Hikaru Nakamura, Alexander Grischuk made Luke McShane suffer without much hope in a queens and opposite-colored bishops ending, Alexander Morozevich won a complicated struggle with imbalanced material against Fabiano Caruana, and Teimour Radjabov won after what had seemed like a normal game was suddenly over when a pin on the d-file became lethal.
Round 2 Pairings:
The tournament site is here, the live feeds can be accessed from this page, and an instant report is available on the TWIC site.
The Tal Memorial organizers came up with an interesting way of making the pairings. Generally the pairings in a round robin are determined randomly, who gets what pairing number. Not this time! In what we might call round 0 of the 2012 tournament, the players had a round robin blitz event, with the top five getting pairing numbers assuring them of an extra white game in the main tournament. Here are the final standings, in tiebreak order (and the tiebreaks made a difference, especially at 5th-6th):
1. Alexander Morozevich 6.5 (out of 9)
2. Magnus Carlsen 6.5
3. Alexander Grischuk 5.5
4. Teimour Radjabov 5.5
5. Levon Aronian 5
6. Hikaru Nakamura 5
7. Evgeny Tomashevsky 3.5
8. Luke McShane 3
9. Vladimir Kramnik (!!) 2.5
10. Fabiano Caruana 2
The first round pairings are easy to deduce from the pairing numbers: 1 plays 10, 2 plays 9, 3 plays 8, etc., and the lower number gets White in each case. Ergo this:
Round 1 Pairings:
It should be a very fun event, and it's nice that the live feed from Moscow is always very good. (As an example, you can replay the live feed from the blitz event here.)
Predictions?
At least for one participant you get to decide, though you can't write in just anyone (e.g. your blogger, yourself, or Mickey Mouse); rather, there are a list of 13 players from whom you can choose. The other nine slots will be determined by the organizers, six of whom have already been chosen.
For more details about who's in, who can be chosen and how to do it, when the tournament is and all the rest, have a look here.
HT: Hylen