FIDE Grand Prix in Beijing Starts Tomorrow (Thursday)
Okay chess fans, you've had three days to relax and think about improving your own game. Time's up, and now the latest elite event is about to get underway. The fourth tournament in the current Grand Prix series starts on July 4 in Beijing, with the following participants: Boris Gelfand, Anish Giri, Alexander Grischuk, Wang Hao, Vassily Ivanchuk, Gata Kamsky, Sergey Karjakin, Peter Leko, Shakhriyar Mamedyarov, Alexander Morozevich, Veselin Topalov and Wang Yue.
The top two finishers in the Grand Prix (the overall series, not this one event) will qualify for the next Candidates tournament, and as Topalov finished clear first in the Zug event and tied for first in London, a win here would guarantee qualification, and even a finish near the top would probably do the job. Other players are certainly in the running as well, and you can see how your favorites are doing by browsing the helpful Wikipedia page on the Grand Prix.
Reader Comments (2)
I compiled an alternative list of the GP standings, including only the two best results to indicate how much they can still improve (at the end, the fourth and worst result is irrelevant, though it can become first tiebreaker), and separating players into three groups:
Playing only Beijing: Topalov 310 (+45), Mamedyarov 220(+20), Morozevich 215(+25), Kamsky 200(+10).
Playing only in September (Paris?): Caruana 225(+80), Dominguez 205(+20), Nakamura 200(+15), Ponomariov 185(+50).
Two more GP events: Wang Hao 210 (140+70), Karjakin 190 (140+50), Grischuk 175 (90+85), Gelfand 170 (140+30), Ivanchuk 65 (55+10), Giri 65 (50+15).
At first sight, it seems that Topalov needs 80 GP points (clear 5th or for example 4th to 6th place) to mathematically qualify even in a - for him - worst case scenario where Mamedyarov is clear first in Beijing, and Caruana clear first in September. Then the final standings would be Caruana 395, Topalov 390(+45), Mamedyarov 390(+20) - the decisive tiebreaking factor being that Mamedyarov's Zug GP was even worse than Topalov's Thessaloniki GP, though both scored 4.5/11 in these events.
Edit: on second thought, even this might not be enough if, instead, two of Wang Hao/Karjakin/Gelfand finish 1st-3rd in both upcoming events for final GP scores of 420 points.
Caruana's chances are less great than they appear in the full list: he played good but not great in all three events, at least not great enough to share first place. And his pretty good result in Tashkent (4th-6th place half a point behind the winning trio) might be discarded in the very end.
Ivanchuk and Giri, seemingly far behind, still have their chances to qualify IF they do very well in both of their last two events.
Exactly what is the Grand Prix series ? Granted, I could just Google it but I'm a bit too lazy right now.
Is it similar to the World Cup series from 1988-89 ?
[DM: Googling it would have been faster than typing the question and would save me time too. Even worse, I linked to the Wikipedia page in this very post, so you didn't need to use Google; a simple, single mouse click would have sufficed. In brief: the top two finishers overall get spots in the next Candidates' event, so it's not similar to the events in 1988-89.]