Monday 28 May 2007

2007 Candidates Matches

The 2007 Candidates Matches are underway in Elista. 16 players qualified by various means (2006 World Cup, Rating etc) and the top 4 players will make it to the World Championship tournament later this year. The Candidates is being run as a knock-out with 6 games matches.
The first game of Round 1 was played last night, with results and games available at the official site http://globalchess.eu/main.php. There is also coverage at the site for the World Championship tournament http://www.chessmexico.com
The players are bracketed into groups of 4 based on seeding so that the winner of the Aronian v Carlsen match will play the winner of the Adams v Shirov match to determine one of the World Championship slots.
My predictions for the 4 qualifiers are: Aronian (beating Adams), Leko (beating Bareev), Grischuk (over Ponomariov) , Gelfand (over Kamsky).
Of course with such a strong field my predictions could be utterly wrong, especially the Grischuk/Ponomariov group.
At the time of this post, both Aronian and Grischuk won their opening games, while the rest of the games were drawn.

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