2021 Carlsen - Nepomniachtchi, Warmup

Today is the opening ceremony for the 2021 Carlsen - Nepomniachtchi (m-w.com) World Championship title match at Dubai. Because of the covid confinements and the Netflix series 'The Queen's Gambit', chess has seen a spike in popularity since the previous title match, which I followed three years ago on this blog:-

• 2018-11-07: 2018 Carlsen - Caruana, Warmup • Plus links to seven previous World Championship events also covered on this blog.
• 2018-12-12: 2018 Carlsen - Caruana, Wrapup

The Carlsen - Nepomniachtchi match, originally scheduled for a year ago, might well turn out to be the most widely followed match in chess history. As a final preparation for the match I updated that page on m-w.com, where the main change was a link to FIDE's own site. It looks like this:-

Official Site:-

fideworldchampionship.com

The m-w.com page has a dozen links to FIDE announcements, which must be a record for my pages and which attests to the organizational difficulties encountered by FIDE over the past two years, again because of the covid-19 coronavirus. One of those dozen links published the schedule for the match, reproduced here:-

No need to memorize that chart. The games will be played on the weekend -- Friday, Saturday, and Sunday -- plus Tuesday and Wednesday during the week. The other two days of the week are 'Free Days'. The small print on the bottom right of the chart says, 'Games start at 16:30 GST | 12:30 UTC'. If you're like me, 'GST' and 'UTC' don't mean much, so here's a useful link to understand that in local time:-

• Time in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (timeanddate.com/worldclock)

I could have added a few more pages to the dozen links already referenced on m-w.com. Instead, I'll start to document them on this blog. The two most recent are:-

• 2021-11-21: FIDE World Championship Dubai 2021: 10 facts about opponents (fide.com) • 'With the FIDE World Championship match between Magnus Carlsen and Ian Nepomniachtchi around the corner it is time to know the reigning champion and the challenger a bit better.'
• 2021-11-23: FIDE World Championship Dubai 2021: Preview (ditto) • 'A special sense of occasion; The odds; The X factors; Showing up; Swings and stamina; Game? Sport? Art? Science?; Chess is ...'

That second page, the 'Preview', is curious. It mentions the first person pronouns 'I' and 'me', but is anonymous. The same writeup on the official site, A Special Sense of Occasion (fideworldchampionship.com), is also anonymous. Oversight or intentional, with so many sites scrambling to cover the match, why should the official site not trumpet its own sources?

There's so much more I could say about the match, but I'll stop here. Chances are that it's already been said a dozen times in a dozen other places.