Games start in 7 days! 2 berths in the 2016 Candidates Tournament are up for grabs! Is everyone else excited?

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My Odds Calculations

Let the discussion begin! Anything you'd like to know? Anything I should run numbers on? I want to put up a lot of World Cup articles on my blog, but need topics before I can write them. Answering questions that are asked here would be a great source of material.

(Already in the works is an analysis of how many first round upsets we can expect to see, there's some fun stuff in there and I already ran the numbers, just need to do the write up. I have a 66% chance that at least one player is eliminated by an opponent rated 150 or more points below them, and a 35% chance of at least one 200+ point upset occurring, along with an expected average of 15 total upsets happening.)

As you use live ratings in the odds calculations anyway, you need to update them once more, taking into account the Sinquefield Cup results. (The other August tourneys, like Abu Dhabi Open, have influenced the odds of the underdogs only, so their impact is not as interesting.)

There's something about watching very strong players play rapid and blitz that I love so much. In slower time controls, you expect them to be playing at a high level, and quite often the moves are going over my head. In the shorter time controls, there's nothing that deep, but what's incredible is the speed at which they form plans, calculate variations and just put their pieces on damn good squares. The chess they are playing now is one that I can understand, but only sit and marvel because I know I could never reproduce it at these speeds. And its SO EXCITING.

So yeah, really looking forward in particular to tiebreak days

Yeah, that's part of what I've been working on today. The numbers in my spreadsheet are now accurate live ratings for all players in the top 100 (those listed on 2700chess.com) and reflect the September rating list for all others. I haven't copied those numbers over to the website yet though.

Edit: nevermind the badly formatted data dump, I just updated the website so you can check updated odds there. Rating updates do reflect today's games in the Polish League.

Chess.com published their World Cup preview (and plugged my blog at the end with multiple links!)

Quality Chess are doing a book giveaway for predicting the results. BJJ you can't miss this. Deadline is one hour before the tournament starts, so about 11 hours from now.

http://www.qualitychess.co.uk/blog/3926

one of the questions is how many first round offsets so you're already sorted there. 15 looks low to me from my back of the envelope calculation.

I looked that over, but there's a ton of coinflip questions. Might be able to have the most equity of any individual entrant if I dug through every question with careful analysis, but that would be hours of work on questions I don't care about that much, for maybe a couple bucks of prize equity? Not sure how many entrants there will be, but I think there's more EV in going to bed early since R1 games start at 3am my time and I'd at least like to be awake before ALL the games finish.

I think they're designed to be coinflip questions, but it's fun to have something to sweat. Unfortunately you have to fade at least one coinflip (question A) to have anything to play for after round 1.

Question 2 (also needed to give you anything to sweat) is also pure coinflip. I had Safarli at 49.3% to advance to round 2, and Mamedov at 49.6%, and both are huge underdogs if they get there.

As for the upsets, here's my counts:

# of Upsets/ Odds
3 0.01%
4 0.02%
5 0.08%
6 0.26%
7 0.57%
8 1.30%
9 2.95%
10 4.64%
11 7.00%
12 9.85%
13 10.81%
14 12.95%
15 12.74%
16 11.10%
17 8.57%
18 6.79%
19 4.53%
20 2.85%
21 1.49%
22 0.85%
23 0.39%
24 0.14%
25 0.07%
26 0.03%
27 0.01%

It'd be cool if our guy WEI YI ships one of the spots.

This would make me so happy! I have his odds at going up to ~2.4% now, after winning with black today (pending updates in all other games).

Gelfand goes down, wow!

Well, his wife probably enjoys it.

But Wei will face Aronian in round 3 if both win round 2!



Perhaps the most spectacular scenario will be Levon making a rook sac and Yi finding a countersac leaving him an exchange up in an unclear endgame.

Wei Yi now 2.3% to reach the finals in my model.

78.9% to beat Vovk
31.5% to also beat Aronian (or Areschenko 20% of the time) and reach round 4
14.0% to also win round 4 against probably Ding (58%) or Navara (31%)
5.5% to reach the semis (56% chance he'll have to beat Topalov here, 15% Radjabov, 12% Svidler)
And if he does all of that, he still has to Giri/So/MVL/Tomashevsky (75% chance it's one of those four) to reach the finals.

Go Wei Go!!!

2.9% now for Wei after winning his first classical game in round 2. Also now the 17th highest rated player in the world!

Onischuk beat Karjakin today! Karjakin must win with white tomorrow to square the match.

Adams and Navara were other upset losers today.


Nakamura made an 18-move draw with white against Shankland. I don't know if that's some kind of energy saving strategy or what.

And speaking of U.S. players, Sevian impressively made two classical draws vs. Radjabov in Round 1, but then lost 2-0 in the rapids.

If Nakamura intended to draw the game from the beginning that would have been a strange choice coming off a rest day yesterday and having the white pieces today. Drawing game one with white definitely hurts your odds of advancing to the next round in this format. I have Nakamura at 82.4% to advance now, down from 89.5% before the draw.

Of course my odds assume that Nakamura's advantage in rapid/blitz tie breaks is identical to his advantage in classical, and while he has a strong edge across the board his edge probably grows as the games get faster, so perhaps he's less hurt by this draw than my numbers claim... but of course he still has to reach tie breaks. With an effective 131 point rating edge (giving Shankland 40 points for having white) I estimate he gets upset tomorrow 12.6% of the time, so even if he were a 100% lock to win potential tie breaks (rather than the 87% I give him) he's still worse off now than he was before today's game was played.

Of course I doubt he really planned to draw before the game started. I think, rather, he just felt he hadn't gotten anything meaningful out of the opening and was comfortable taking a draw rather than pressing with no advantage.

Karjakin can only beat the Chinese. With so many still alive he really got a poor draw.

A tidbit I didn't work into my daily blog update:

Every top ten seed is a favorite to advance to round 3 at this time, but the odds that all ten of them advance are only 22.6%. A big name or two is probably going down in the next two days - I just can't say who yet.

meh, not a good day

Odds of the entire top ten reaching round three are now up to 30.7% (with a 1.4% chance they all make it to round four!)

Odds Wei Yi reaches the final and earns a berth in the Candidates Tournament are down to 1.7%, but he's still a 3:1 favorite to win tomorrow's tie breaks.

Shame about Onischuk. Hate his chances in the tiebreaks.

#97 seed Lu Shanglei is making a nice run. He's knocked out two 2700+ players. Now he gets a 2800+ Topalov in the next round

Odds of Wesley So winning it all have to be ~80% at this point, yeah?