Caruana maintains the lead
After round 8 of the Candidates tournament, Fabiano Caruana remains in the lead after drawing Wesley So. Alexander Grischuk moves up to third after beating Vladimir Kramnik, and the other two games were drawn.
We're halfway done in Berlin
With half of the Candidates tournament behind us, Fabiano Caruana is now alone in first place after defeating Levon Aronian. Sergey Karjakin won a nice game vs. Wesley So, and the remaining two games were drawn.
Mamedyarov and Caruana tied for the lead
The sixth round of the Candidates tournament saw a new co-leader as Mamedyarov beat a struggling Kramnik to join Caruana in the lead. Wesley So righted his ship with a victory over Levon Aronian. The other two games of the round were drawn.
A cruel finish after six hours
The Candidates put on quite a show on Wednesday. Kramnik lost in heartbreaking fashion to Caruana, who leapfrogged him and is now the tournament leader. Meanwhile, Grischuk and Ding also played a spectacular game, but it fizzled out to a draw. Aronian bounced back nicely from the steamrolling he took from Kramnik in the previous round with a win versus Karjakin. Wesley So and Mamedyarov drew a very reasonable game that unfortunately had to compete with its far flashier brethren for attention today.
No change in the leader board after round 5
The status quo was maintained after round five in Berlin as all games were drawn. Leaving us with the same leader board as yesterday: Caruana on top, with Mamedyarov and Kramnik half a point behind.
A rocky start for the organizers
As you may already know, the 2018 Candidates Tournament is being held in Berlin, Germany. What you may not know, is that it’s being held in a building called "The Kühlhaus", which means “The Cooling House”. This makes sense, considering that the building served as a warehouse from 1901 into the 1950s.
Since the 1990s, The Kühlhaus has served as an event location, impressing visitors with its pre-war industrial architecture, offering a unique atmosphere. Very kühl, indeed.
The former World Champion leads the field in Berlin.
Vladimir Kramnik played a brilliant game Monday to take sole 1st place after three rounds in Berlin. Mamedyarov and Caruana, who had been tied with Kramnik going into the round, drew a tense encounter to stay half a point behind.
Storing games efficiently with move ordering heuristics and Huffman coding
Our database runs on 3 servers (1 primary, 2 secondaries), each with two 480GB SSDs in a RAID 1 configuration, and one server with a 1h delayed replica. We need more storage space, so we're upgrading the servers and we're also trying to store the games more efficiently. This post explains some technical details of the new storage format.
One step closer to finding a challenger for Magnus!
It was a far calmer day today as only one of the four games ended decisively. Grischuk beat Wesley So to make up for losing to Kramnik yesterday while all the other games were drawn. The early leaders are still the three winners from the first round: Kramnik, Mamedyarov and Caruana.
Fierce action in the 2018 Candidates Tournament
The 2018 Candidates Tournament began on Saturday. 8 players will play a 14 game double round robin and the winner will advance to play a World Championship match later this year with current champion Magnus Carlsen. The tournament will take place in Berlin from March 10th to 29th.