BOTW: 2016.11.07

John Upper's picture
Submitted by John Upper on Mon, 11/07/2016 - 09:59

There's a super-abundance of world class chess this week: with the Carlsen-Karjakin World Championship match being the highest profile, but perhaps only the second-strongest match this week. Other highlights include: the European Club Cup (with 25 GMs over 2700), the Champions Showdown in St.Louis (Caruana, Nakamura, Anand and Topalov), and more...


European Club Cup
Nov. 5-13, 2016
Novi Sad, Serbia

62 teams compete in a seven-round, six-player Open team Swiss. The main attraction is the high quality of players: 145 GMs, and 25 over 2700, including: MVL, Kramnik, Aronian, Ding Liren, Mamedyarov, Dominguez, Grischuk, Ivanchuk and Gelfand. Other former 2700+ players are Shirov, Morozevich, Radjabov and Leko. 14 teams are entered in the women's team event, where the top players are  Hou Yifan, Anna and Mariya Muzychuk.

homepage
http://euroclubcup2016.com/

Live Video with commentary (GM Eric Hansen and IM Miodrag Perunovic)
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaGabYCqucpsqgvNtD0Nxxg

Standings
http://chess-results.com/tnr246470.aspx?lan=1&art=1&turdet=YES&wi=984 

2016 Champions Showdown
St. Louis
Nov 10-14, 2016

Fabiano Caruana, Hikaru Nakamura, Vishy Anand and Veselin Topalov play three Round-Robin events: at three different time controls, including a 12-round quad-RR on the final day.

Games start each day at 1pm CST.

http://uschesschamps.com/information/2016-champions-showdown 

World Chess Championship
November 11-30, 2016
New York City

World Champion Magnus Carlsen defends his title against GM Sergey Karjakin in a 12 game match in New York City at the Fulton Market building in the seaport district of Manhattan, just south of the Brooklyn Bridge.

November FIDE ratings:

    • Carlsen 2853 #1
    • Karjakin 2772 #9

The rating difference of 81 points means Carlsen is expected score 61.4% 

Head-to-head Record: Carlsen leads +4 =16 -1

Youngest World Championship match ever: 

  • 1892: Steinitz (55) and Chigorin (41) -- 96 years
  • 1927: Capablanca (39) and Alekhine (35) -- 74 years
  • 1966: Petrosian (37) and Spassky (29) -- 66 years
  • 1984: Karpov (34) and Kasparov (21) -- 55 years
  • 2016: Carlsen (26) and Karjakin (26) -- 52 years.
     

Format:

  • First player to score 6.5 in a 12 game match. 
  • No draw offers before move 30.
  • Unusual Time Control: 40 moves/100 min + 20 moves/50 min + game/15 min + 30s/move from move 1.
  • Tie-breaks:
    1. 4 games at 25 min +10s
    2. 2 game blitz matches of 5min + 3s. Maximum 5 such blitz matches (10 games).
    3. Armageddon game: Black has draw odd with White 5 min vs Black 4 min, + 3 sec as of move 61.


Homepage
https://worldchess.com/nyc2016/

Rules
https://www.fide.com/fide/handbook.html?id=144&view=article

Live Commentary (games start at 1pm EST)
Canadian GM Eric Hansen will be doing live commentary on the first six games for chess.24

https://chess24.com/en/wcc2016

World Championship Preview

GM Daniel King's "PowerPlay" YouTube channel is one of the best free chess resources on the web. His most recent videos analyze previous games between Carlsen and Karjakin. 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMBATpFb--uLNAODOVWvCTA

and if that isn't enough...

the TCEC SuperFinal between Houdini 5 and Stockfish 8+ is (tentatively) scheduled to begin "after" November 9. With both programs somewhere over 3200 elo, this will probably be the best-played match ever... so expect a lot of draws.

Format:

  • 100 games
  • time control: Game/180 minutes + 15 seconds per move.
  • They play both White and Black from 50 standard opening positions chosen by the organizers.
  • both programs will run on the same 44-core computer.

Before the final match, TCEC ran a 32-player double-RR Rapid event: 25' + 10". 
Houdini won with 55/62, ahead of Komodo (53) and Stockfish (52).

http://tcec.chessdom.com/live.php

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