The Candidates tournament to determine the challenger later this year to world champion Magnus Carlsen is now well underway in Moscow. Early indications favoured the former champion Viswanathan Anand, the new young talent Sergei Karjakin, and Lev Aronian, Olympiad gold medallist, all of whom scored in the opening rounds. The main victim of their initial surge was Vesselin Topalov, the former Fidé champion, whose conduct in his games at the start was unrecognisably supine. This week’s puzzle features his loss to Anand.
An instructive element of the official website (moscow2016.fide.com) is a potted history of previous Candidates tournaments and their winners, including such luminaries as David Bronstein, Vassily Smyslov, Tigran Petrosian and Mikhail Tal. All of these, with the exception of Bronstein, went on to win the title, and all four faced the Red Czar of Soviet chess, Mikhail Botvinnik, in their championship quests.
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