World Cup Day 3 (End of Round 1)

As I write this, the first round of the FIDE World Cup is still not quite over. One out of 64 matches has gone to the Armageddon tiebreaker — the match between #85 Mateusz Bartel of Poland and #44 Gabriel Sargissian of Armenia. But the other 63 matches have...

World Cup Day 2 Recap

The second day of the World Cup was a pretty bad day for the Americans and a pretty good day for favorites. The top six seeds all advanced to the second round, so the highest-seeded player who has not yet punched his ticket to round two is #7 Alexander Grischuk, who...

Beyond the Chessboard

There’s no question in my mind what the game of the day was on the first day of the 2015 FIDE World Cup. But first, let’s review what happened. Even though none of my prognostications can actually go wrong on the very first day, because every player who...

World Cup Prognostications

Tomorrow the FIDE World Cup chess tournament begins in Baku, Azerbaijan, the birthplace of former World Champion Garry Kasparov. I’ve gone from being a detractor to a fan of the World Cups. I hated them when they were masquerading as a world championship. I...

I’m Over It Now

Thanks to my blog readers for all their helpful comments on my last post. Especially I’d like to give credit to Todd Bryant, who figured out that my 60th move against Bryon Doyle was just fine. In fact, 60. Rxh6 is the most natural move there, and several people...