A good day for previous candidate winners...
Credits: Stev Bonhage / FIDE
The first day of the Candidates Tournament in Madrid has concluded with an action-packed first day. Daily, Lichess is providing a broadcast of the games played in real-time. We also have a selection of annotated games by GM Nijat Abasov and video recaps by WGM-elect Jesse February, further below.
credits: Maria Emelianova / FIDE
The Candidates Tournament kicks off in Madrid, with the opening ceremony taking place at the Palacio de Santona on June 16th, 17:00 UTC, and the first round to be played on June 17th, 13:00 UTC.
No opening theory, only pure instinct and chaos
It's variant time! After the last 960 TA, GM Oleksandr Bortnyk manages to win again. Unlike the previous titled arena, where the 1st player won with a staggering 36 point difference. The finish here was super close. Maybe this also comes from the nature of the variant, where everyone knows equally much about the opening. Thanks to a 6-game streak ending with a long draw Bortnyk manages to take the lead and went from 10th to 1st in the last 23 minutes. Only to finally win by 2 points from IM Mahammad Muradli and IM onamissionfromGod. This makes it his 5th arena win out of the 11 arenas this year. Bortnyk's long draw didn't work in everybody's favour. His opponent and TA regular IM Mlchael dropped from 3th to 5th place thanks to this long draw. He still managed to get top 5 just like the last 960 Arena and had after msb2 the highest performance this event.
Chess960 allows for beautiful attacking games, quick wins and blunders thanks to the confusion. 10.8% of the 1537 games got a decisive result within only 15 moves. Also our official commentator GM Felix Blohberger was impressed by the 18-year old Svane's fireworks in this game:
IM Minh Le won the May Titled Bullet Arena on Saturday by a gigantic 36 point margin. Winning his first Titled Arena way back in September of 2017, Le has been a regular at the top of the leaderboard from the beginning. It is one of the largest margins of victory for a Titled Arena ever. Second place was another regular, GM Oleksandr Bortnyk. Third place was young Greek GM Nikolas Theodorou who had a long and profitable day. He also won a strong Chessable prize tournament that ran directly before the Titled Arena began.
GM Oleksandr Bortnyk won the Blitz Titled Arena on Saturday, ahead of GM neslraCsungaM77 in 2nd, and GM Andreikin in 3rd. Bortnyk has now won 4 Titled Arenas in 2022. Having won this Blitz Titled Arena, along with a Bullet event and Chess960 event, he's now won every possible flavor of Titled Arena this year. The tournament seemed to declare final victory for the high-berserking strategy popular in previous events. 3 of the top 4 players did not play a single game with the allotted 3 minutes on their clock, and 8 of the top 10 had a berserk rate over 50%. The one holdout was Andreikin, who finished with the best performance rating of the event but did not play enough games quickly enough for enough extra berserking points. Leave your thoughts on this development below in the comments. Is 100% berserking fine or should we change the rules to prevent/discourage it?
Announcing our schedule for upcoming Titled Arenas!
We're pleased to announce a schedule for our upcoming World Championship Titled Arenas!
All events will be preceded by a warm-up arena open to all players with a minimum of 20 rated games in the relevant time control (excluding 960 warm-up, where the minimum rated games are 10).
It gives us great pleasure to announce the Lichess World Championship, an event that will be contested exclusively on lichess.org. With the announcement that FIDE has decided to open up the World Champion title to any organization that would like to run such a competition, it was only a matter of time until Lichess threw its hat in the ring, and we feel our World Championship can stand toe to toe with any of them! With the exception of a brief period in the 90s and early 2000s, there has usually only been one World Chess Championship contested at a time, a real missed opportunity for the sport. In the last few days the number of Chess World Championships has quickly ballooned to 3 and may soon exceed that, a sure sign of chess’ exploding popularity.
IM Minh Le won the April Blitz Titled Arena on Saturday in a very tight event where the top 4 all finished within 5 points of each other. Most of the top players berserked heavily. Le berserked in 92% of games and second-place GM Oleksandr Bortnyk berserked in 97%. Carrying the flag for anti-berserkers was seventh-place GM Vladislav Artemiev who did not berserk a single game. Artemiev finished 12 points behind Le with a performance rating 170 points higher.
Runner-up Rapport also qualifies for the Candidates
All our inner workings exposed!
EDIT: April fools! Lichess wasn't "hacked" but we do make all our source code available for everyone, and we always have. Lichess is open source which allows contributors from all over the world to collaborate on building Lichess.