Picking the Candidates with Greg Shahade

Photo Eric Rosen

With the Candidates now just two days away (*knock on wood*), it’s time to get serious. Who’s going to win? CLO reached out to one of America’s leading chess handicappers to provide our readers with the inside dirt. Welcome back to uschess.org, IM Greg Shahade!

Greg's Picks and Percentages

The Favorite:

photo Justin Kellar

Fabiano Caruana (37%): Fabi has won this before and after a strong Tata Steel he’s the favorite to win it again. With the number 2 rating in the world by a significant margin, and experience at winning the Candidates in 2018, there is no question that Fabi is the player to beat, and in my opinion he is currently a level above Ding Liren and shouldn’t be in the same category.

Second in Line:

photo Lennart Ootes

Ding Liren (27%): Ding is certainly the player with the second highest chance to break through. Ding is a super solid player who rarely loses, but in a tournament like this in which you must finish in first place, his solid style may not be to his benefit. If he did win it would make his match with Carlsen very interesting. While Caruana got crushed by Carlsen in a rapid tiebreak, Ding convincingly beat Carlsen in the tiebreak at the Sinquefield Cup. However if we take a look at how Ding won the Sinquefield, he did it with 2 wins and 9 draws. A plus two score usually won’t be enough to win in the Candidates, and you could chalk that win up to good fortune in that no one had a bigger score.

The Darkhorse:

photo Justin Kellar

Ian Nepomniachtchi (12%): Nepo has the kind of style you’d like for a winner take all tournament like this. He wins and loses a lot of games, and has many fewer draws than his peers. In the Sinquefield Cup there was no player who had more than two decisive games...except for Nepo. Nepo had 6 decisive games out of 11, with 3 wins and 3 losses. If he keeps playing his kind of uncompromising chess, and maybe slows down and thinks a bit more in the critical moments, he’s the kind of guy who could put up a big score in the first half and put a lot of pressure on the rest of the field. I’m slightly influenced by Magnus Carlsen singling him out as the one guy aside from Caruana and Ding that he could see winning the event. (Editor’s note: GM Jacob Aagaard also sees Nepomniachtchi as the darkhorse in our preview video with CLO editor John Hartmann.)

The Underdogs:

Maxime Vachier-Lagrave (10%), Alexander Grischuk (8%) and Anish Giri (6%) I don’t think any of these guys have a great chance to win the tournament, but they are all strong enough where it could happen. I have listed them in the order of how likely I think it is that they can win the event. They all have their weaknesses: Maxime has no flexibility in his opening choices (plays e4 almost every game, the Najdorf every game and the Grunfeld every game). I think it hurts when your opponent knows exactly what opening you’re going to play. Maxime also had less time to prepare for this event, so he’s less likely to have opening surprises in store than other players. Grischuk gets in time trouble way too often, and while he plays well under time pressure, it definitely opens him up to some inaccurate moves late in the game. Giri draws too many games. In fact in the 2016 Candidates he scored 14 draws. In Tata Steel he drew 11 games, lost one and won one. In the Sinquefield Cup he drew 9 games, won one and lost one. This kind of result is simply not enough to win the Candidates.

The HUGE underdogs:

Wang Hao (1%) and Kiril Alekseenko (<1%) I don’t see either of these two winning the event. Wang Hao has a very draw heavy style. In the 2019 Karpov Poikovsky round robin in June, Wang Hao drew every game, many of them being very short draws in under 30 moves. This kind of style just isn’t going to cut it if you want to win the Candidates. Alekseenko is about 150 points lower rated than Fabiano and there’s no reason that someone outrated by nearly 100 points in every game should have a realistic chance to win the event. However Alekseenko is a strong young player and has a chance to perform a lot better than people think. There was a lot of discussion that MVL should get the wildcard ahead of him, so I am sure that he would like to at least have a better score than MVL. He is also a big opening theoretician and relatively predictable in his openings (always plays 1.e4, always replies to 1.e4 with e5). It will be interesting to see if he has any surprises up his sleeve, as he has had months to prepare for the biggest chess event of his life.

With this information, you are now ready to join in one of the most venerable traditions of American life: fantasy sports.

Greg helped the Chess24 team create their two (overall and round by round) Fantasy Chess competitions for the 2020 Candidates. You can participate in both by going to: https://chess24.com/en/read/news/fantasychess Chess fans looking to double their odds of winning a contest should also check out the traditional Quality Chess quiz: http://www.qualitychess.co.uk/blog/7403