World Championship Candidates
: Created:27 Apr 2011 , byThe schedule for the 2011 Candidates Matches has been announced and it's good to see that the whole process will be completed in May. Eight players are lined up and the winner of the third round (the final) will challenge Viswanathan Anand for the title later this year.
Although I would have preferred six game matches in the first and second rounds the event taking place in Kazan, Russia has the great virtue of brevity with a 3rd of May start and a 27th of May finish.
In the first round, Bulgarian former champion Veselin Topalov faces Gata Kamsky a former challenger for the FIDE crown and another former champion, the formidable Viktor Kramnik meets Azerbaijani, Teimour Radjabov. Armenia's national hero Levon Aronian has a tough match against Alexander Grischuk and Boris Gelfand will need all his experience to hold off Shakhriyar Mamedyarov.
The first and the second round will be four game matches and the final will be six games. I'm a notoriously bad picker of winners but for what it's worth, I'm going for Topalov, Radjebov, Aronian and Mamedyarov to win in the first round and Lev Aronian to be victorious in the final and go on to beat Anand to the delight of the whole Armenian nation.
The elephant in the room but not at the Kazan venue is Magnus Carlsen, the stay at home Norwegian but I've no sympathy with his decision to withdraw from the Candidates and if Carlsen finds himself challenging in 2012 or 2013 in a hostile Erevan, tough luck!
My email is davidebbett@yahoo.co.uk and reasonable comment and dissenting views will posted on this website.