Anand - Carlsen Resources

The much anticipated Anand - Carlsen title match starts in a little more than a week, so I'll use this week's World Chess Championship blog post to assemble a list of resources that I'll be following.

The formal title of the match is FIDE World Chess Championship 2013, Chennai, India, sometimes abbreviated to FWCM2013, and the official site is

• chennai2013.fide.com

The most important page on the site is the schedule, where I see that the first 12 games start at 03.00 PM (Indian Time). That's four and a half (!?) hours ahead of my local time, which means they will be starting at 10:30 AM for me.

• FWCM Chennai 2013 : Schedule
• Current local time in India – Tamil Nadu – Chennai

I well remember the 2000 FIDE Knockout Matches, held in New Delhi (last round in Tehran), where Anand won his first World Championship title. At the time I compiled links to a list of news reports from India -- 2000 FIDE Knockout Matches, Reports from The Hindu -- which still lead to the original pages, nearly 13 years after the event. Here are links to two respected Indian news organizations, which should be excellent sources of on-site reporting in English.

• Chess - The Hindu
• Chess - The Times of India

As for a Norwegian source, there is a language barrier, but there are good translation tools to overcome this. I couldn't find a chess category, so here's a Google news search.

• site:aftenposten.no magnus carlsen [past month]

Since most chess fans know the main chess news sites, I won't list them here. If I discover a tag or category specific to the match, I'll add it to the end of this post. As for mainstream news sources, here's a link and an RSS feed to the same.

• Results : anand carlsen [Google News]
• Google Alert - anand carlsen

The Twittersphere (or Twitterverse, as some folks prefer) will be red hot. I won't try to anticipate its center of gravity, so I'll just list the account associated with the official site. It's been relatively sleepy until now.

• Anand - Carlsen 2013 (FWCM2013) on Twitter

Whenever I get the chance, I'll be watching the games live on the ChessBomb / Chessdom Live Arena. It always offers decent analysis from a world class player along with the usual mixed bag of comments from chess fans. A good post-game source is Chessgames.com, which also has an accurate record of past encounters between the two players.

• Anand-Carlsen World Championship (2013)
• Classical games: Viswanathan Anand beat Magnus Carlsen 6 to 3, with 20 draws

Finally I'll list my own page, which I won't update until the match is over.

• World Chess Championship : 2013 Anand - Carlsen

That's a good start. I'm sure I'll be consulting this post frequently throughout the match.

***

Later: Here are a few links for match reporting on the main chess news sites:-

• FIDE World Chess Championship Anand-Carlsen 2013; TheWeekInChess.com, TWIC
• Tag=World Championship 2013; Chessbase.com
• News from 'World Chess Championship 2013'; Chessdom.com
• site:chessvibes.com anand carlsen; (past month, sorted by date)
• site:chess.com anand carlsen; (past month, sorted by date)

Plus a few blogs maintained by match insiders:-

• susanpolgar.blogspot.com: Chennai; Susan Polgar
• Mate in Chennai; MateInChennai.com, Eric van Reem

I'll add new links as I discover them.

Anand - Carlsen Interviews

With the big Anand - Carlsen match only two weeks away, here are a pair of similar interviews with the players.

Interview with Anand prior to his match with Carlsen, 2013 (23:16) • 'World Champion Viswanathan Anand interviewed after 8th "Tal Memorial" in Moscow. Most of the questions regard his upcoming (November 2013) match with title challenger Magnus Carlsen.'

The 8th Tal Memorial took place in June.

Interview with Carlsen prior to his match with Anand, 2013 (11:03) • 'Interview with the highest rated chess player in the world, challenger for the world championship Magnus Carlsen from Norway. Taken after 8th "Tal Memorial" in Moscow. Most of the questions regard his upcoming (November 2013) match with World champion Vishy Anand.'

See Youtube channel ChessTVOfficial for more, although most of the videos on the channel are in Russian.

2012-13 GP / 2013 WCC

My previous post, 2012-2013 Grand Prix, Paris, added the sixth and last event of the current cycle's GP series to my page on the 2012-2013 Grand Prix.

The next task was to add the GP series to each player on the Index of Players, which cross-indexes all World Championship events to the players who competed in the many events. The table on the left lists the 23 players who competed in the just completed GP. The middle column shows a player's overall score and the right column shows the number of games played.

It's worth noting that the most successful player, GM Caruana, did not qualify for one of the two places in the forthcoming Candidates tournament. Those qualification spots went to the next two players on the list, GMs Topalov and Mamedyarov, although GM Grischuk had the same score as Mamedyarov. These anomalies occurred because each player's worst GP tournament is dropped from the calculation of the overall score.

One action remains: to document the overall score for all players. Although I looked in all of the usual places, I couldn't find the FIDE calculations. This is still open for the 2011-2012 FIDE Women's Grand Prix, an event which finished two years ago. I could calculate the scores myself, but I'll probably end up copying them from Wikipedia.

***

While I was preparing updates, I also added a link for the official site to may page on the forthcoming 2013 Anand - Carlsen match. I found two official looking logos on that site and, not sure which one to use, I used both. The artier logo is shown on the left.

The opening ceremony takes place on 7 November, followed by the first game on 9 November. The games will be played at a rhythm of two games on consecutive days, followed by a rest day. If the match goes the distance, there will be an additional rest day between games 11 and 12, then between game 12 and the tiebreaks, which are scheduled for 28 November. Like most observers, I hope the match goes the distance. World class chess deserves a great show.

2012-2013 Grand Prix, Paris

I added the crosstable and PGN for the 2013 Paris event to my page on the 2012-2013 Grand Prix. The SB tiebreak values on my page don't match the calculations on the official site, but I've used my algorithms so often that I don't think they're at fault. The official site might have used a nonstandard formula, like excluding a value. I'll investigate if I get a chance.

More important is to wrap up the series, since the Paris event was the sixth and last scheduled tournament. I need to add the calculations that determine the overall winner (and qualifiers to the Candidate event), plus add the participants to the index that cross-references players and events.

Despite its shortcomings, the Grand Prix series has become a fixture on FIDE's World Championship calendar. It might be worthwhile documenting its forerunner, the GMA World Cup of the late 1980s.

2013-2014 Women's Grand Prix, Tashkent

I added the crosstable and PGN for the 2013 Tashkent (Uzbekistan) event to my page on the 2013-2014 FIDE Women's Grand Prix. Following the 2013-2014 Women's Grand Prix, Dilijan, this was the third of six events in the Women's Grand Prix series.