Plessiez

Well, after today it definitely looks like the Carlsen-Niemann thing isn't going away any time soon...

Congratulations to Ding Liren on qualifying for a world championship match, I suppose.

The engines seem to dislike 16. g4 too (and both of Firouzja's next moves as well, especially 18. g5). And Nepo definitely looks to be better now. I don't think we're going to see second-half collapse. (Apparently Firouzja's prepartion for today's game included staying up late playing hundreds of bullet games, which ... well.)

Replying to myself since I realize I worded this badly: "later that year" means "in 2000, when the Kasparov-Kramnik match was played", not in 1998. And having googled, Anand only become FIDE world champion in December, a few weeks after Kramnik beat Kasparov. But Anand won the Chess World Cup (which was in part a qualifer for the World championship tournament) in September, before the Kramnik-Kasparov match. (Bonus fun fact: I've seen it alleged in a few different places that Kramnik won a prize fund of a few hundred thousand dollars for losing to Shirov, while Shirov was told that he'd only get his share of the prize money for that match after playing Kasparov. Which ... well, he never did.)

Disappointing answer, but I don't think there have been any big upsets since the Candidates switched to its modern double round robin system back in 2013. Or any small upsets, either, really: the winner of the tournament in recent years has always been somebody who was in first place (either tied or outright) within a couple of rounds, and more often than not they've stayed in first place for almost the entire tournament. (So if Nepo were to somehow lose from here ... well, it would be quite an achievement.) That said, there was almost a big upset in that very first 2013 tournament: at the halfway point Kramnik had made seven draws and was three points behind Carlsen and Aronian, only to win four of his next five games and become sole leader after twelve rounds. But Carlsen managed to beat Radjabov in round 13 to tie for first again, and then both players lost in the final round, allowing Carlsen to qualify based on his tie break. Before the title reunification in 2007 the system used to determine who got to play a world championship match was ... well, a mess, but single tournaments like the current system have historically been a pretty rare way of selecting a challenger, at least since the 1950s. Actually, thinking about it, arguably the biggest technical upset involves Kramnik again: he lost a match to Shirov in 1998 whose winner was supposed to go on to play Kasparov for the (non-FIDE-approved) title, but that match never happened. Instead, Kasparov decided his next opponent would qualify based on rating alone. The highest rated player after Kasparov at the time was Anand, but he refused to play (I'm not sure why, but he was either already the FIDE recognized champion at that point or would become so later that year). So Kasparov played the next person down on the rating list, who was ... Kramnik. So arguably Kramnik managed to play for (and win!) the world title despite twice failing to qualify: he didn't beat Shirov and he wasn't the highest rated player. Which is improbable enough that I don't feel too bad for him missing out in 2013. (Probably not what you had in mind though, I know.)

Haven't managed to read much this month. I finished Max Gladstone's The Ruin of Angels, which I liked quite a lot. (I still think it's a shame the series abandoned its earlier naming system though.) Jason Sanford's Plague Birds was fun but by the end of the story the world seemed awfully small. And T. Kingfisher's Nettle & Bone was well done, but not quite up to the level of the only other two Kingfisher books I've read (The Hollow Places and A Wizard's Guide To Defensive Baking). I did enjoy P. Djeli Clark's A Master of Djinn, although (vague spoilers) That means I've read four of this year's Hugo nominees now (the other three being Akardy Martine's A Desolation Called Peace, Shelley Parker-Chan's She Who Became The Sun and Becky Chambers' The Galaxy, and The Ground Within), and honestly while I didn't dislike any of them I'm not sure any of them are particularly great either. I had sort of the opposite reaction. Not knowing anything about the author or setting before I started, the first reference to what was clearly a previous story in the same universe made me think 'I should go and read that once I've finished this', but utlimately it feels like the novel ends up summarizing everything that happens in enough detail I didn't feel that I'd missed out on not having read it. Although I now see there are several earlier stories, so I might try looking out for them. (Oh, and I've read a couple of hundred pages more of Dhalgren since I last posted in this thread, but I'm nowhere near finishing it yet.)

Caruana has White against Nepomniachtchi in Round 9. Looks like that could be the crucial game of the tournament. Not that it particularly matters which of those two wins if Carlsen's serious about not playing the winner: they're so far ahead of the pack (Nakamura is in clear third place on 50%, 1.5 points behind Caruana and 2 points behind Nepo) that the odds must be that whichever of them doesn't win the tournament will finish second. Though given how their respective matches went, you'd think that Carlsen would be a lot more willing to play Nepo at this point than Caruana, wouldn't you?

I almost didn't notice that the Candidates had started. Early days yet (we've just reached the first rest day), but Nepo and Caruana are tied for first at the moment (with Ding Liren trailing at the bottom again, sadly). Given Carlsen's threats not to play the challenger if it's anybody but Firouzja, it would be pretty funny if we ended up having a Nepo-Caruana World Championship match next year. (At least, I believe that FIDE's position is that there would be a match between the winner and the runner-up of the Challengers in the event that Carlsen doesn't play?) It would definitely be a very strange situation though, and I hope it doesn't happen (whether because Firouzja wins or Carlsen turns out to be bluffing). Of course, FIDE have stripped an existing world champion of their title before, but Fischer had stopped playing professional chess already by that point while Kasparov kept calling himself world champion and set up a whole rival title qualification process, which was treated at least as seriously as FIDE's by most people (at least while Kasparov retained his version of the title). It doesn't seem like that would make sense for Carlsen to do, if he's really just unhappy about having to keep playing matches (I guess he could try arranging a match against Firouzja, if it comes to it, but I hope Kasparov's example shows why splitting the title like that is a bad idea). But having the world champion just stop being the world champion but carrying on playing chess (and being very obviously the strongest player in the world) seems pretty unsatisfying all around. Would people consider either Caruana or Nepo genuine world champions at that point? (I do think the pace of world championship matches is a bit excessive though. One long match every three or four years seems far more sensible than the current pattern of short matches every other year.)

I think that the last time I posted in this thread (or maybe in its predecessor?) I was talking about starting Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren "soon". Still haven't actually done that (which I'm choosing to blame on the fact I've been sick for most of the last month), but in the meantime I've read the first two books of Naomi Novik's Scholomance trilogy (A Deadly Education and The Last Graduate, which are both fun and move at an engaging pace but don't really feel particularly deep), Tasha Suri's The Jasmine Throne (this is the first book in a trilogy, I think; I liked it enough that I'll be reading the sequel), as well as rereading the first couple of Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence (Three Parts Dead and Two Serpents Rise). I originally read the first five Craft Sequence books a few years ago (back in spring of 2017, according to Goodreads) and liked them quite a bit, although for some reason I never got around to reading the sixth one when it came out a few months later. But I enjoyed rereading the first two enough that I'm now about 75 pages into the sixth, The Ruin of Angels ... which, it turns out, heavily features a returning character from one of the books in the series I didn't get to in my reread. But hopefully I'm not forgetting anything too critical. And after I finish this, I'm definitely going to start Dhalgren. (Well, maybe.)

As somebody who quite liked the book myself, I'd say that if you're not interested within the first hundred pages or so (and arguably sooner) you're probably not going to find the rest much of an improvement. There's definitely a wider plot happening in the background that the POV characters aren't fully aware of yet, but the book is really about those characters more than anything else.

Yeah, that's official now. So the more interesting part of the Grand Prix's over already. I feel rather sorry for Aronian, given how close he got. Have to admit that it looks very unlikely that he'll be qualifying by rating either (despite my earlier guess). Even if there's no special exemption made for him, Ding Liren has now scheduled a lot of games over the next month and is already back up to number two in the world on the live rating list after winning the first few. Specifically, he's more than 35 points clear of Aronian, so he'd have to have some unbelievably terrible results in April to let himself be overtaken. At 39 years old, I really think this must have been Aronian's last chace to reach a world championship match. Although looking at the rating list, I'm surprised at how (relatively) old everyone on it seems. Other than Firouzja, Duda is the only player under 25 years old in the top twenty, and there are only three others in the top thirty. Feels like a few years ago that was very different (mostly because it was the same people on the list a few years ago, I guess?).

Finished Startide Rising a few days ago. Not much to add to my earlier comments. There's some interestingly weird stuff in it - not surprisingly, really, given how much the setting clearly owes to the work of people like John Lilly in the 1960s and 70s - and I am glad I stuck with it, but I won't be investigating the sequels. I quite liked Daniel Abraham's Age of Ash. Agree with people who've said it's not hugely original, but I thought it was well done. That said, I wasn't entirely sure what the point of But presumably there's some other point to it that I'm just not getting right now.

Yeah, I think Rapport must be safe now. The other big recent development is that Karjakin looks to have been disqualified (I think he could technically still appeal, but that doesn't seem likely). Apparently his place will be taken by whoever has the highest rating of the not-already qualified players who has also played at least 30 games since June 2021. (The 'played at least 30 games' clause seems to be there just to stop the spot automatically going to Ding Liren. Honestly, it seems to sit rather oddly with FIDE's gifting of a place in the Grand Prix to Nakamura, when he hadn't played any rated games in years.) But I think the upshot is that Aronian is probably going to the Candidates too, one way or another. He's up to #4 in the world now and Firouzja has of course already qualified. I don't think DIng Liren is going to play the 20-odd games he needs to before May 1st to qualify by rating, but I suppose he could if he really wanted to.

I read Helene Wecker's The Golem and the Jinni last week. It wasn't bad by any means, but it honestly didn't ever really grab me and I'm not entirely sure why. Though having said that I finished it pretty quickly, so I can't have disliked it that much. And in an odd coincidence I am also currently reading Brin's Startide Rising. I bounced off this pretty hard when I first tried it (sometime last year, I think), but I'm making better progress on my second attempt. About a third of the way in this time around and my take would probably be the same as Ormond's (the almost endemic sexism -- especially the way the Dennie/Sah'ot subplot is being handled so far -- is pretty offputting, and I'd rather be spending more time with the aliens). Next up after this I'm going to either read Daniel Abraham's Age of Ash or finally persuade myself to try Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren (or try to read beyond the first page, anyway).

Richard Rapport just beat Dmitry Andreikin in the final of the Belgrade GP, which (when combined with his semi-final place in the first Berlin GP) seems to put him in pretty good place to reach the Candidates. But Rapport's qualification is not guaranteed yet: there are six players left who've only played in one leg so far and at least reached a semi-final, and any one of them could match or overtake him after the second Berlin GP. And -- for example -- if Nakamura reaches the final but loses to Andreikin, I believe that both of them would qualify ahead of Rapport (each would have a total of 23 GP points to Rapport's total of 20). I'm pretty torn on who I want to qualify. On the one hand, Nakamura hadn't played a rated game for two years before being handpicked by FIDE to take part, so him qualifying ahead of somebody like Giri or MVL would seem pretty unfair. But on the other hand, it would be very funny.