Holy god, why is it red and white? My eyes!

"If the White Stripes can pull this off, so can we! Black, white, red - it's gonna look totally cool and modern!!"

Here we go!

Aaaaaaaand we're off, here we go.

That color scheme is truly awful. The red color is really tough to look at, it's way too bright. And it's red haha.

the graphic is working for me but not the video commentary

That official site is the nut low: SQL errors, redrawing empty boards on refresh where pieces appear sometimes after 30 seconds, empty boards etc. Switching to another relayer, grrr.

Interesting choice by Kramnik to go with 4...Nxd5 instead of 4...exd5. Very curious to see how this one plays out.

Stream of moves - http://chessbomb.com/site/
Video feed (few minutes lag and low quality) - http://new.livestream.com/WorldChess/Round1
ICC Commentary with GM Seirawan - http://www.chessclub.com/broadcast



Is this a Nimzo theme tournament?

Yeah I was surprised to see that as well. But Svidler's response doesn't look too impressive..

Radjabov also went for a provocative opening giving up a lot of space vs. Gelfand. Looks dangerous to me.

Agree completely, Svidler didn't seem to get anything. The game simplified quickly and now he has a tiny, tiny advantage at best. Maybe not even an advantage, just a slightly easier to play position. I'm posting this after 15...Bd7, for reference.

I'm curious to see what Radjabov does here. He might just be trying to play solidly and see if he can force Gelfand into overextending and creating a weakness. Radjabov sure looks cramped now, though.

Looks like Carlsen did what he wanted against Aronian. Easy draw with black against one of his biggest competitors.

I turned it on late, figuring I'd catch all the good stuff, and missed Carlsen's entire game.

3/14/2013: everyone super excited for the candidates tourney
3/15/2013: everyone remembers how boring super GM games are most of the time

Daut,

I have faith in Carlsen. Black against Aronian seems like the one time to be boring. now, gogogogo. The others can draw all they want, Carlsen +6!

there's got to be a more accurate/less intensive way of predicting than a monte carlo, doesn't there? not trying to knock your work, which is well done, but i've always been a little perplexed by monte carlos.

when did the bogo become hot stuff again? are the Ba6 QID lines all tried out? if we're going to be seeing a lot of bogos i fear we're going to be in for a pretty boring tournament. =(

and what the hell is svidler doing in this tournament if he's not even going to try when his opponent picks a pretty questionable opening???????

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcU9B...ure=youtu.be&a

nice recap of the round by chessexplained. the ones he did for tata were way longer but im sure he will go more in depth for interesting games.

If I was Svidler and saw Kramnik play Nxd5 I'd be more than a bit concerned. The standard play in those lines can get very sharp and Kramnik is undoubtedly going to be extremely well prepped whereas I imagine Svidler is far from an expert in the line given its rarity. I think pragmatically speaking his choice was probably one of the best.

chessexplained said that kramnik is an expert at the nimzo and presumably svidler expected this was at least fairly likely when playing d4 so its probable svidler had something interesting prepared against this and when kramnik decided to go for a rare off line probably messed with svidlers head.

Couple of decisive games today.

MattF(165): A British GM once spotted Chukky running around outside the playing hall pretending to be riding a horse like a little kid ... during his game

Hahahaha

Less computer intensive, yes, in that once it was properly set up it would produce a more accurate result in a much quicker fashion. It would be feasible to do a full probabilistic breakdown that would be better in every way - once it was set up.

It would be much more complicated to program initially, though. The appeal of Monte Carlos is that it took me about 2 hours total to write the code for a few subroutines. Basically it's just write a formula to set odds for a single game based on whatever factors, then nest that formula in a bunch of loops to simulate a full tournament. Super simple coding. Now I can just click the start button, let it run in the background while I do other stuff, and see the results when it's done.

So basically I like Monte Carlos because I'm lazy. That's also why I program in Excel VBA, lol, I can use a worksheet to store numbers so that I don't have to learn how to work with arrays. Sure they're much more efficient, but I'd rather do a little less work on my end, even if it means the computer has to do much MORE work on its end, and take three times as long

Well it looks like the gloves came off pretty fast.

Ivanchuk-Aronian looks shockingly similar to one of my 3 0 games in terms of subtlety

Gelfand-Carlsen looks like an equal position that Gelfand will likely have enormous trouble holding as every move the position is already seeming to somehow slip more and more into Carlsen's favor.

Svidler-Radjabov is some sort of Benko gambitish thing.

Kramnik - Grischuk - Grischuk played the gruenfeld against Kramnik and seems to have walked into a mountain of prep. The position is super dynamic and Kramnik finally seems to have started thinking on move 22. He's more than an hour ahead on the clock.

the live stream page isn't loading for me

gogogoooooooooooo Grischuk!!!!!!!!!!!