Another Boring Catalan

FIDE's World Cup Tournament kicked off today. The format is 128 players in a knockout format. Agadmator provides some video analysis of a boring Catalan from the first day. I recommend it.



You can find an interview with the player of the White pieces here.

An interesting interview with Svidler & Karjakin

Peter Svidler and Sergey Karjakin have given an interview to 64, the Russian chess & draughts magazine, about their match in the finals of the recent World Cup. Vladimir Barsky conducted the interviews and Chess24.com has provided a translation of the first part of the article. If you're interested in current events, this is a worthwhile read.

FIDE World Cup Coverage

The FIDE World Cup is coming to a close. Peter Svidler and Sergey Karjakin reached the finals and thus qualified for the 2016 Candidates Tournament to determine Magnus Carlsen's next Challenger. In that sense, the two of them have accomplished the missions they had set out for themselves.

But it's still good to win a tournament, and the winner gets an extra $40,000 in prize money ($120,000 vs $80,000) for his efforts. So that's the motivation for winning the four game match (plus tie breakers, if needed) at the end of the event.

For those not following it, Svidler won the first two games, so he only needed a draw in today's game to win the match. Unfortunately, nerves got the better of him and he lost in horrible fashion.

I bring all this up because Dennis Monokroussos has provided a great piece of analysis on today's game. You can find that on his blog, The Chess Mind, here. He does a great job describing the psychology of the game as well as the variations. The meat of it is in the analysis that you can find at a link at the bottom of his post.

And for live coverage of tomorrow's final regulation game, chess out Chess24.com.