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Year Book 2019-20 Contents |
Calendar of Events – Results/Reports |
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26/03/2020 FIDE World Championship Candidates Tournament 16/03/2020 to 04/04/2020 8 Boris Yeltsin Street, Yekaterinburg The good news for those wishing to follow master chess live, during the coronavirus epidemic, was that the Candidates tournament, somewhat controversially, was allowed to go ahead, with 8 budding GMs with ages ranging from 22 to 30 and averaging 28, vying for the opportunity to challenge 29-year-old Magnus Carlsen for the World Chess Championship.
Yekaterinburg is, of course, where the Russian royal family, the Romanovs, where executed.
Games could be watched live on chess24.com and the like, though the named site seemed to be labouring sometimes under heavy demand, and crashed at least once.
The tournament was an 8-player all-play-all twice event, and the first seven rounds were completed on schedule. However, on Thursday 26th of March, the date of round 8, Russia announced that from 27th of March air traffic in and out of the country would be subjected to unspecified interruption. Accordingly, Arkady Dvorkovich, FIDE President, on 26/03/2020 (his birthday as it happens) announced a halt to the event to allow players and officials a chance of returning home.
The results from the first 7 rounds (below) will stand, and the plan is that the remaining 7 rounds will be played later, when possible.
“Half-time” scores in the 2020 Candidates Match, which it is hoped will be continued at some time in the future.
Russian players presumably have their own personal preferences for rendering their names in the Latin alphabet, though “standard” conventions exist. The spelling “Ian Nepomniachtchi” is somewhat misleading. Firstly, the first name is pronounced as “Jan” in “Jan Timman”, i. e. as English “Yan” would be pronounced. Secondly, the “chtch” represents the Russian consonant which English students of Russian learn as being like the English sh-sound followed closely by the English ch-sound (both of which also exist independently in Russian). This consonant is found at the start of “shtchi”, meaning “cabbage soup”. Thus the spelling “Yan Nepomniashtchi” might be better understood by English-speakers. The “sch” in “Grischuk” represents the same consonant, and not the sh-sound spelt “sch” in German.
The name “Anish Giri” might well be recognisable as not “Dutch”. The name is in fact Nepali, though the player was born in Russia, and for chess purposes he is registered as from the Netherlands, where one assumes he now lives. |
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