No joke, but I am sure that this "thing" is costing him Elo points.

Gelfand takes it off before the game, so it doesn't get too hot in time trouble.

Yea I think tournaments like this you can throw the 'ratings' favourites out the window. Plus they are all relatively close in rating

Think all the players will be a dog to carlsen pretty badly. My own personal view is that giri would run him the closest though it would be a draw feast.
He is the kind of guy if he won a game early he is so tough to beat it would be a close match.
However the problem for him is that to qualify you need to win games not draw in the candidate tournament!

Didn't see this +1 plus what other poster said he won't ever qualify in this format.

He would do well under the old system of interzonals I think.

The fact that Giri drew every game so far is quite misleading. He only bailed out against Anand so far. Everything else was pretty much fought out. He was a pawn up against Topa and had a winning position against Caruana and nobody can claim that he drew these games intentionally. He also missed a point where could he could get a clear advantage against Karjakin. Actually Giri had quite a streak of tough luck so far. Not was bad as Svidler, but almost as bad.

His result fits into his typical pattern, but it's one of these cases where it doesn't reflect the truth.

Maybe the broader truth is that he's not quite in the elite when it comes to forcing the full point from a better position, so draws more games than he should.

Deleted a bunch of off topic arguing. Take it somewhere else

10 in a row!

My favorite quotes from random chat:
Giri is drawing attention
Giri is an artist, he likes to draw

lol at the thought of anand/carlsen 3 ResidentSleeper

Giri is definitely trying to win, I'm not sure too many people watching the games thinks he's just settling for a draw every time. However, his play style really does lend itself to this. For him to win such an event he has to beat Caruana in that game and probably also Topalov in their game. And then he still likely has to find another win, perhaps near the end of the tournament when someone is too tired.

It's just tough b/c he doesn't give himself a ton of potentially "easy" wins. Caruana, on the other hand, is getting into a ton of sharpish games that should have been decisive. He's luckily drawn one and unluckily drawn one, but he's playing much more of a style that provides the necessary variance to win this type of tournament.

I have a feeling that in the next year or two Giri will figure out how to switch his style back to being a bit more aggressive in terms of preparation and find which spots he can press harder. Kind of the opposite of what Wesley So is doing, where a year ago he was winning or losing every game and now he's drawing a ton of them, trying to be a bit more like Giri b/c I think he knows he can make it a sharp win/lose game if necessary.

Or perhaps Giri is simply going to try to be like Carlsen and never lose games, but start squeezing out his small advantages. The difference is that Carlsen seems to put much more pressure on his opponents throughout the game where Giri simplifies into what he thinks may be a technical win but one that's very hard to convert OTB with time constraints.

Well this is going to be fun. Aronian will have the tiebreak over either or both of Karjakin/Caruana at this point if he can catch up.

These comments are inane and don't reflect in the slightest what's happening in his games. He's not playing the Berlin and Exchange slav and offering draws on move 17.

Too bad they took this one down. Seems like any other move would have been pretty profitable

No way. When's the last WC-path game that didn't start with c4/d4/e4/Nf3/g3?

Look closer.

Oh, yeah, if "void your bet, close your account, and **** you around for the money" is profitable, it would have been very profitable.

Wow.

That is hilarious. Thanks for sharing.

I wonder whom they hired to figure out these odds.

Btw, thanks to Naka losing to his collegue, Fabiano is back in the race. That's how you do it! Fellow russians Svidler and Grischuk lost to Kramnik in the 2013 candidates to keep him in contention also. Actually Svidler always lost to Kramnik when Vlad needed a point to win a tournament. Amazing coincidence isn't it? Svidler was also Kramniks second for quite a while...

It is actually amazing that Carlsen qualified since he didn't get any of these freebies. In a way it reminds us of Fischer who had to qualify on his own back in the day too.

Do you have anything concrete to back up these assertions?

Yeah....I don't think Naka would ever throw a game to Fabi. He's never been too supportive of him (or almost anyone really) in any interview, ever.

I wouldn't even be surprised if Topa received a nice little leather case with a couple of grand from the "sponsors" to make Caruana-Carlsen happen in New York.

https://www.y*utube.com/watch?v=DicYF4RQBnU

Ok, I guess something went wrong

I love how Svidler keeps thinking for 10 minutes over an obvious win only to have Aronian waiting a bit longer. No smiling today I guess.