FIDE World Candidates Tournament 2014

As the readers could notice in the last period there was not so much activity on the blog.
There were objective reasons for that, as I had very tight schedule, with a lot of competitions and other chess activities.
I can promise that it will be much more frequent articles in the coming period, as I am opening the training phase (which usually comes during Autumn for me, but this year I decided to do a bit different) and it will be almost two months before my next tournament (which will also be a quite little event of five rounds). I would not forgot to show some things from Cannes and Malmö, not only from my games, and it will be also some other thoughts about various subjects. For the start of the new period I want to share some thoughts about FIDE World Candidates Tournament 2014.




The most of people likes to speculate about chances of the players in chess but I know that it´s in other sports too.
The huge majority of experts, chess journalists and the amateurs, predicted that the winner will be among the duo, Aronian and Kramnik.
It was pretty safe prediction, as Kramnik can always raise to the occasion, while Aronian is rating favourite and he showed some kind of extraordinary form lately.
The first two rounds showed that it can be the case, as Kramnik already has 1,5 out of 2, while Aronian won very convincingly in round number two, after losing in the first round against Anand.
Anand is join leader for now, and he still has a lot to say about everything, but I personally do not believe that he will win the tournament.
Svidler is also the join leader of the tournament and I see him as a dark horse of the tournament.
I think that with Karjakin we can close the list of the players who can win the tournament.
Mamedyarov, Topalov and Andreikin are the players who can impact the top virtually every round, but I think that they can not win the tournament.
Mamedyarov seems not to be consistent enough while Topalov lost his ability to smash the opponents in his style as in the middle of first decade of the new century.
Andreikin has not enough quality, as simple as that.

I am sure that the tournament with Caruana and Nakamura would be more interesting, but these guys could not qualify, in very fair system of qualifications.
The only drawback of this system for the World title is that it is very frequent.
We can see this in the Grand Prix circle, as that circle is very near to collapse.

In the second round, Kramnik won hos game against Karjakin, and so far that game is the best in the tournament.
I was not completely sure that Kramnik would do well in this candidates tournament, as he showed some very shaky form after the last candidates tournament in London, but it seems that he is fully recovered....
The next two weeks will answer this...

Standings:




For now you can enjoy the games: