Busy days here, and with Thanksgiving just a couple of days away (Happy Thanksgiving!) I’ve fallen a bit behind on my blogging. No matter: we will get caught up over the next few days. Let’s get started.
The Meltwater Tour Finals. This ended in a resounding win for Magnus Carlsen, who won all seven matches, needing a blitz playoff only once (against Le Quang Liem, who took him to an Armageddon game before succumbing). It was a tour de force, and his 20/21 was enough for an eight point margin over Wesley So, who finished second. I still intend to finish analyzing all the decisive games from the remaining rounds; for now, here’s round 4.
The Season 23 Superfinal of the Top Chess Engine Championship (TCEC) finished with Stockfish the comfortable winner - again - over Leela Chess Zero, 58.5-41.5. Well done, and thanks again to the Stockfish developers for keeping the best chess engine on the planet (excepting AlphaZero, anyway) free.
ChessBase 17 is out. It’s not necessary to upgrade, of course, but if you don’t have a version of ChessBase it’s worth considering. So far, I’m enjoying the new bells and whistles. There are some discounts today, including for an upgrade from version 16. (To be clear, I haven’t worked for ChessBase for a dozen years, I’m not getting any freebies or kickbacks from them, I paid for versions 17, 16, 15, etc.; and there are plenty of their products that I wouldn’t recommend. This is purely a heads-up for those who might be interested.)
Chess.com’s Speed Chess Championship. There are 16 participants in their latest event, which begins today (Wednesday). Here are the pairings, along with the match dates:
Fabiano Caruana vs. Arjun Erigaisi (November 23)
Ding Liren vs. Alexander Grischuk (November 27)
Ian Nepomniachtchi vs. Maxime Vachier-Lagrave (November 28)
Levon Aronian vs. Dmitry Andreikin (November 30)
Magnus Carlsen vs. Dommaraju Gukesh (December 6)
Nihal Sarin vs. Anish Giri (December 7)
Wesley So vs. Nodirbek Abdusattorov (December 8)
Hikaru Nakamura vs. David Paravyan (December 8)
Aside from Paravyan, it’s a murderers’ row lineup, with only Alireza Firouzja missing out of the top eight players in the world in classical chess. Nakamura and Carlsen are the obvious favorites, but I wouldn’t be shocked if Caruana, Sarin, Ding, or So won the event.