World Candidates: Carlsen wins, Smerdon loses

A quick update: Magnus Carlsen will play Vishy Anand later this year for the title of World Chess Champion after the young Norwegian won the candidates tournament on tie-break from Vladimir Kramnik.

This was certainly the most dramatic top-level chess tournament I’ve ever seen, and the drama didn’t stop until the final game. Perhaps most amusing to readers of this blog, I basically predicted everything incorrectly over the final rounds in an astonishingly bad streak. Carlsen scored only 0.5 from his final three games, losing with white to both Ivanchuk and, in the last round, Peter Svidler. Kramnik spectacularly beat Aronian with the black pieces in round 11 to give him outright first, but the lead was relinquished the following round when he failed to convert his advantage against Gelfand. It turned out that just a draw would have sufficed in the final round against the mercurial Ivanchuk, but of course Kramnik couldn’t have predicted that Carlsen would lose and therefore the Russian played very risky chess in his game – a ploy that eventually backfired when Kramnik was forced to resign in the last game of the tournament.

So Carlsen and Kramnik both lost in the final round, but still ended up tied for first on the surprisingly low score of plus-three – far removed from my confident prediction of “plus-five or plus-six”. Indeed, nothing I guessed came to pass.

This does not bode well for my Champions’ League predictions this week.

(For info: Bayern – Juventus 1-0; PSG – Barcelona 0-1; Real Madrid – Galatasary 2-0; Malaga – Dortmund 1-1.)