While we wait for the U.S. Championship (and a certain podcast) to go live, we’ve got some fresh chess action to look forward to starting tomorrow (Sunday), as the round of 16 of Chess.com’s Global Championship gets underway with its first two matches: Wesley So vs. Jeffery Xiong and Levon Aronian vs. Sam Sevian. (Very inconveniently for U.S. fans, of the seven Americans in the final 16, six are paired with each other.) Both start at 9 p.m. CET/3 p.m. ET.
Two more matches take place the following day, starting three hours earlier: Fabiano Caruana vs. Dmitry Andreikin and Hikaru Nakamura vs. Leinier Dominguez. (While it’s a coincidence that the Americans are almost all paired with each other, that they are playing so early in the round is not, as they are all playing in the U.S. Championship, except for Nakamura.)
Two more matches on October 5: Anish Giri vs. Pavel Ponkratov and Jan-Krzysztof Duda vs. Alexey Sarana. (Like those on October 3, they start at 6 p.m. CET/12 noon ET.) Finally, the last quarterfinal spots will be settled in two very high-powered contests: Ding Liren vs. Nihal Sarin and Ian Nepomniachtchi vs. Teimour Radjabov, both starting at 3 p.m. CET/9 a.m. ET.
Note that the temporal order is not the bracket order, which looks like this:
Nakamura - Dominguez
Duda - Sarana
So - Xiong
Caruana - Andreikin
Nepomniachtchi - Radjabov
Giri - Ponkratov
Ding - Sarin
Aronian - Sevian
More about the event, here.