SuperUnited Rapid & Blitz Starts Wednesday
More Grand Chess Tour fun.
Fear not, the huge (five-day) gap between the Superbet classical tournament and the SuperUnited (not just United, mind you, but SuperUnited) Rapid & Blitz is drawing to a close. (No pun intended, despite the dearth of decisive games in the last event.) The next Grand Chess Tour event starts in Zagreb, Croatia on Wednesday, with the usual seven full-time Tour participants along with three wildcards.
The format is a familiar one: a single round-robin of rapid chess (25’+10”) with each game counting double (two points for a win, one for a draw) followed by a double round-robin of blitz (5’+2”) with standard scoring (one point for a win, half a point for a draw). The rapid portion will take three days, with three rounds a day, and there will be two days of blitz with one round-robin per day.
The participants are Fabiano Caruana, Ian Nepomniachtchi, Gukesh Dommaraju, Wesley So, Anish Giri, Alireza Firouzja, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Vidit Santosh Gujrathi (wildcard), Levon Aronian (wildcard, replacing Magnus Carlsen who had an urgent family matter), and Ivan Saric (wildcard).
The official website is here, but you’ll probably find the TWIC page (once it’s up) much more helpful. (Of course, there will be some coverage here as well.)