Yekaterinburg Candidates - First Week

Last week's post Yekaterinburg Candidates - Kickoff, coincided with the second round of the tournament, so we have a full week of play to review for this post. In the equivalent post from two years ago, Berlin Candidates - First Week (March 2018), about the 2018 Berlin Candidates Tournament, I created a chart showing the round-by-round progress of the three previous Candidates tournaments: 2013 London, 2014 Khanty-Mansiysk, and 2016 Moscow. That chart is again shown here.

I also noted,

In all three tournaments, the eventual winner was from the group of players who had a plus score after round 3. The winner was also one of the leaders after the first half of the tournament.

Did the same pattern hold for 2018 Berlin? Indeed it did. After the third round, GMs Kramnik, Caruana, and Mamedyarov all had plus scores. Caruana, alone in the lead after the seventh round, went on to win the tournament. Strange perhaps, but true.

As for the 2020 Yekaterinburg tournament, GMs Nepomniachtchi, Vachier-Lagrave, and Wang Hao had identical plus scores (+1-0=2) after the third round. The seventh round, being played today, will give us another prediction about the eventual winner.

Yekaterinburg Candidates - Kickoff

The 2020 Candidates Tournament is already into its second round and I haven't done a kickoff post like I did two years ago in 2018 Berlin Candidates - Kickoff (February 2018). First, here are some links to basic information:-

• Official site: en.candidates-2020.com
• Current Local Time in Yekaterinburg, Russia
• My page: 2020 Candidates Tournament

Next, here is a crosstable showing the historical record of all previous games between the eight players -- including the current World Champion -- courtesy Chessgames.com. The links behind the players' names go to their rating cards on ratings.fide.com:-

	Ale	Car	Din	Gir	Gri	Nep	Vac	Wan	:	Car
Alekseenko	xx	*	*	*	*	*	*	*	:	*
Caruana		xx	*	*	*	*	*	*	:	*
Ding Liren			xx	*	*	*	*	*	:	*
Giri				xx	*	*	*	*	:	*
Grischuk					xx	*	*	*	:	*
Nepomniachtchi						xx	*	*	:	*
Vachier-Lagrave							xx	*	:	*
Wang Hao								xx	:	*
Carlsen									:	xx

That's enough to get started. As soon as I can, I'll update my WCC pages with the latest FIDE annnouncements.

***

Later: Re that last sentence, 'I'll update my WCC pages with the latest FIDE annnouncements', I added eight announcements from FIDE.com to my page on the 2020 Candidates Tournament. Five of the announcements were related to the coronavirus pandemic currently sweeping the planet. Also worth noting from FIDE.com is a series on the eight players in the candidates, each titled 'Introducing Candidates':-

• Kirill Alekseenko
• Wang Hao
• Anish Giri
• Ian Nepomniachtchi
• Maxime Vachier-Lagrave
• Alexander Grischuk
• Ding Liren
• Fabiano Caruana

I list them here in the same order that FIDE published them. Was it lowest rated to highest rated?

I also intended to add a new page for the title match to be held later this year -- coronavirus permitting -- but found no annnouncements on FIDE.com. One report published on this year's leap day, World Championship match almost certain to take place in Dubai (chessbase.com), started,

During the 90th FIDE Congress in Abu Dhabi, the President of the Federation Arkady Dvorkovich mentioned that this year's World Championship match will almost certainly take place in Dubai as part of the 2020 World Expo, clarifying that this is not yet a formal announcement.

I couldn't find an earlier call-for-bids on that match.

C29 Zonal Links

Continuing with the previous post, C29 Zonal Rating Reports, I added the links listed there -- all for ratings.fide.com -- to my page Zonals: Links (and Other References). That page now covers ten cycles (C20-C29), one cycle per column, which is probably as wide as it should be. I should also note a couple of details about the page, both related to my own conventions for numbering the FIDE 'zones':-

• I changed the numbering for the 'European Small Nations Championship' from '1.10' to '1.0s'.
• I added '3.1e' even though I'm not sure it served as a World Cup qualifier.

Both of those conventions need to be consistent across all of my other pages. The titles at the top of the page, e.g. '2001-11 KO Moscow', should also be linked to my corresponding pages.

C29 Zonal Rating Reports

With only a few weeks remaining before the start of the 2020 Candidates Tournament, Yekaterinburg (15 March - 5 April, according to my page), I have just enough time to tackle the first of the Small Projects for 2020:-

An exercise for the current cycle is still not finished. [...] There remains 'C29 Zonal Rating Reports' and 'C29 Zonal Links'.

Most of the remarks I made for the same exercise in the previous cycle, C28 Zonal Rating Reports (February 2018; 'continental and zonal events that played a role in the current World Championship cycle: C28'), are still valid in 2020, so I'll just list the links to ratings.fide.com (rfc) for the current cycle. The link titles are from rfc.

• 1.0: 2018-03 - European Individual Chess Ch 2018 - Georgia
• 1.0: 2019-03 - European Individual Chess Championship 2019 - Former YUG Rep of Macedonia
• 1.0s: 2018-04 - European Small Nations Individual Championship 2018 - Faroe Islands
• 1.3: 2019-06 - Nordic Chess Championship 2019 Open - Norway
• 2.0: 2018-06 - American Continental Championship 2018 - Uruguay
• 2.0: 2019-07 - XIV American Continental Chess Championship 2019 - Brazil
• 2.1: 2019-04 - 2019 U.S. Championship - United States of America
• 2.2: 2019-04 - 2019 Canada Zonal - Canada
• 2.3: 2019-05 - Torneo Zonal 2.3 Absoluto 2019 - El Salvador
• 2.4: 2019-04 - Campeonato Zonal 2.4 Absoluto 2019 - Ecuador
• 2.5: 2019-04 - Zonal 2.5 Absoluto 2019 - Uruguay
• 3.0: 2018-12 - Asian Continental Open Championship 2018 - Philippines
• 3.0: 2019-06 - Asian Continental Open and Women's Championships 2019(open group) - China
• 3.1: 2019-06 - Asian Zonal Chess Championships 2019 Zone 3.1 Open - Jordan
• 3.1e: 2018-11 - Arab Indv. Chess Championship 2018(Open) - United Arab Emirates
• 3.2: 2019-03 - Asian Zonal Chess Championships 2019 Zone 3.2 Open - Bangladesh
• 3.3: 2019-04 - FIDE zone 3.3 Championships (Open) - Mongolia
• 3.4: 2019-05 - Zone 3.4 FIDE Men Championship 2019 - Uzbekistan
• 3.5: 2018-08 - Zonal 3.5 Chess Championship 2018 Male - China
• 3.6: 2019-02 - 2019 Oceania Open Zonal - Guam
• 3.7: 2018-12 - NATIONAL SENIOR OPEN CHESS CHAMPIONSHIP-2018 - India
• 4.0: 2019-07 - Championnat Individuel Africain 2019 Open - Tunisia
• 4.1: 2019-04 - Zonal 4.1 Championship 2019 - Algeria
• 4.2: 2019-04 - Africa Zone 4.2 Individual Chess Championship 2019- Open Section - Kenya
• 4.3: 2019-04 - 2019 Zone 4.3 Individual Chess Championship Open - Madagascar
• 4.4: 2019-04 - Zone 4.4 Individual Chess Championships 2019 - Ghana

I double checked those reports against my own page, Zonals 2018-2019 (C29), and everything seemed to match. My page was also useful as a template for building preliminary links to the rfc summaries by country/month.