The Candidates Starts Today!
Who will earn a title shot against Ding Liren? Plus: The Women's Candidates also starts today.
It’s finally here: the 2024 Candidates - both the “men’s” and the women’s - starts today in Toronto, Canada, with the winners of each earning the right to play for the World Championship against Ding Liren later this year and Ju Wenjun in 2025, respectively. I will focus on the “men’s” (it’s in fact an open event, but only men are playing this time around) tournament, but will keep an eye on both.
The tournaments are double round-robins played with a classical time control of 40 moves in two hours; if a game reaches move 41 the players get an extra half hour on the clock and start playing with a 30-second bonus after each move. In case of a tie for first, there will be a rapid (and, if necessary, blitz) playoff to determine the winner.
There are eight players in each, who qualified through a variety of means. Ian Nepomniachtchi qualified by being a finalist in the last World Championship cycle, losing in heartbreaking fashion to Ding Liren in the last game of a rapid playoff in their title match last year.
Magnus Carlsen, Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa, and Fabiano Caruana took first through third in the 2023 World Cup, which offered three qualification spots. As was widely expected, Carlsen was not interested in playing in the World Championship cycle and gave up his spot, allowing Nijat Abasov, who finished fourth, to be the event’s third qualifier.
Vidit Gujrathi and Hikaru Nakamura took the two spots available from the 2023 FIDE Grand Swiss.
Dommaraju Gukesh took the spot for the 2023 FIDE Grand Circuit.
Finally, with the help of an 11th hour tournament designed specifically to let him have a chance of qualifying, Alireza Firouzja qualified by having the highest rating for players who had not otherwise qualified (and who wanted to do so - Carlsen would of course have qualified by rating, had he been interested in participating).
In the women’s event, the qualifiers are Lei Tingjie (who barely lost her title match to Ju Wenjun last year, 6.5-5.5), Kateryna Lagno and Aleksandra Goryachkina from the Grand Prix, Nurgyul Salimova and Anna Muzychuk from the Women’s World Cup, Rameshbabu Vaishali and Tan Zhongyi from the Women’s Grand Swiss and Koneru Humpy by rating.
In case you’re thinking to yourself, “Huh, that’s funny: there’s a ‘Rameshbabu’ in both the Men’s and Women’s Candidates”, it’s a little less coincidental than you might think. Remember that for Indians the family name is given first, and in fact Praggnanandhaa and Vaishali are brother and sister. A remarkable achievement, the second “first” for the family, which is the first ever to have a brother-sister duo have the full grandmaster title.
I won’t engage in predictions for the Women’s event, but let’s have at it for the men. (You’re of course more than welcome to offer predictions for both.) Let’s list the players in rating order, and then engage in some speculation.
Fabiano Caruana (2803, USA, 31 years old)
Hikaru Nakamura (2789, USA, 36 years old)
Alireza Firouzja (2760, France, 20 years old)
Ian Nepomniachtchi (2758, Russia, 33 years old)
Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa (2747, India, 18 years old)
Dommaraju Gukesh (2743, India, 17 years old)
Vidit Gujrathi (2727, India, 29 years old)
Nijat Abasov (2632, Azerbaijan, 28 years old)
Caruana has achieved almost everything there is to achieve in classical chess. He has achieved the third highest rating of all time, behind only Carlsen and Garry Kasparov, and he came closer than anyone else in the 13 years that Carlsen has been the uninterrupted #1 to passing him on the rating list. (He came within a point of him in 2018.) He drew the classical portion of his World Championship match with Carlsen in 2018, only losing that contest in the rapid playoff. He has spent more time as the world #2 over the past decade than anyone else (I think), and Carlsen has repeatedly said that he’s the one player he respects most.
Caruana’s results over the past year leading up to the Candidates have been quite good. My sense from both his interviews and his play over the past year is that he’s extremely motivated and confident, and unless he’s in randomly bad form it’s hard to see him finishing outside the top three.
It’s hard to know how seriously to take Nakamura’s protestations of “I’m just a streamer” (I’m reminded of the late great Phil Hartman’s feignedly naive “I’m just a caveman…” in the old “Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer” SNL skits in the 1990s). I think that he, like Magnus, is much more interested in shorter time controls than classical chess in a general way, but I’m not convinced that he doesn’t care about the World Championship cycle.
Regardless, he’s strong, he’s experienced, and he has been in good form the past year. He’ll be in the running.
Firouzja is an immense talent, but does he have the experience needed to win an event like this? He had a poor result in last year’s Candidates, going -2; has he made the necessary adjustments to right the ship this year? Maybe he’ll be the World Champion someday, but I’m going to assume based on last year’s result that he’s still at least one more cycle away from really contending.
Nepomniachtchi, by contrast, has already proved he can win a Candidates tournament - he has won the last two. Only one player in chess history has won three Candidates events (can you guess or figure out who it is? I’ll give the solution at the end of the post), but I think he has a good shot at it. He’s strong enough, experienced enough, and probably still has buckets full of prep from the last two Candidates-and-World Championship cycles in addition to all the new material he and his team have created for this go-round.
I think that of the remaining four, the best chances for a Cinderella story belong to Pragg. His progress has been fast and steady, without any obvious setbacks, and he seems enormously self-confident. I think Gukesh’s best may be better than Pragg’s, but his results have shown a lot of volatility, and I’m not persuaded that he will bounce back at his best when he takes a punch. Vidit is a great player, but I don’t think that he can hang with such a field for 14 rounds. As for Abasov, he had the event of his life to get here; that said, it would be a great achievement for him to avoid taking last place. His chances of winning are better than my chances of becoming the next president of the United States - but not much.
I think Caruana will win, with Nepo and Nakamura (in either order) nipping at his heels. Then Firouzja and Pragg (in either order), then Gukesh and Vidit (in either order), and then Abasov.
About pairings: FIDE wisely pairs players from the same country in the first round or rounds (depending on how many players are involved) of each cycle, to avoid collusion in a later round. Therefore Caruana and Nakamura are playing in round 1, and the Indian players will face off over the first three rounds (likewise for rounds 8-10, the first three rounds of the second cycle). Here’s what we’ve got for round 1, which starts at 2:45 p.m. ET:
Caruana - Nakamura
Abasov - Nepomniachtchi
Firouzja - Praggnanandhaa
Gukesh - Vidit
The answer to the trivia question is Anatoly Karpov. He won the Candidates in 1974 (which qualified him to play a match with Bobby Fischer, who refused to play, making Karpov the champion), in 1986 (a Candidates “Super-Final” match against Andrei Sokolov - not really a full Candidates victory, perhaps), and then again in 1989-1990 (when he went through the full Candidates cycle to earn a last title match with Kasparov).
Very solid analysis as always, Dennis! Your predictions make perfect sense.