world championship

Those going there to watch it live are falling for an Agon scam
Al Capone would have proud of.

You pays your money (on average £55.00) and you get a time slot
to attend the playing venue - 30 minutes. See picture of ticket below.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Drp-sQUWsAEBow5.jpg:large

After your 30 minutes you are booted out to make room
so other luckless punters can get their 30 minutes worth.
This way Agon can sell 300 or 450 tickets at £55.00 a pop
to keep re-filling a hall that holds 150 seats. It's a masterpiece.

@venda said
An excellent way to follow the championship is on www. chessnetwork-youtube but not until the day after of course.
The analysis and alternate lines are all covered

Chessnetwork (Jerry) actually does a live stream analysis of the games, as well as "highlight" youtube vids.

You can watch his stream live on Twitch, link below:
https://www.twitch.tv/chessnetwork/

His easy-going relaxed style of analysing strong games always appealed to me,
so for events such as world championships he's always my go-to.

His youtube videos are always good, too.
Very instructive, often highlighting things that were missed during the games
and often gives reasons why certain moves may have been overlooked.

Not sure if u need to have a twitch account or not just to view the stream...
but it's free if you do, I've had one for years.

p.s. Greenpawn, that is shocking to hear about Agon...... but then again, not too surprising.

@greenpawn34 said
Those going there to watch it live are falling for an Agon scam
Al Capone would have proud of.

You pays your money (on average £55.00) and you get a time slot
to attend the playing venue - 30 minutes. See picture of ticket below.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Drp-sQUWsAEBow5.jpg:large

After your 30 minutes you are booted out to make room
so other luckless punte ...[text shortened]... or 450 tickets at £55.00 a pop
to keep re-filling a hall that holds 150 seats. It's a masterpiece.

What an incredible surprise to hear this! Glad i didn't get a ticket. The only ones left were "VIP" tickets for £400!!! Wonder if they are just for 30 minutes as well? Wouldn't be surprised..

@KellyJay

where are all the TN's ? theoretical novelties? These guys have teams of GMs working for them I haven't seen any TNs yet !!

I'll be there for game 5. Hopefully I can get a good blog out of it.

I will not pay the ticket price. If I cannot sneak in (I have two ideas in mind)
I'll spend all ticket money I put aside in the chess shop at Baker Street.

@greenpawn34
good luck and I hope you have a great time...please let us know how it goes..

@ogb said
@greenpawn34
good luck and I hope you have a great time...please let us know how it goes..

Draw in game 5.

Draw in game 6.

The chess.com commentary is not unbiased. If you're rooting for Magnus these two are not that fun to watch - unfortunately. Imo.

"Game 6 drawn"

That doesn't do the game justice at all, it was a fascinating game and even had a missed win.

Yes, a missed win... but I do not blame them for not seeing it!
If these guys had all day to play, like a correspondence game on here, they may have seen it.

From this position, Black to play:

There is a very deep forcing continuation which wins for Black,
the idea being to force zugzwang and eventually picking up the h-pawn.

This was understandably missed and the players shortly after agreed to a draw,
both believing the position to be a "fortress".

Full analysis in the below video, Jerry (Chessnetwork) provides a breakdown of the game,
including the winning continuation from the above position.

YouTube

For sure, if Caruana saw and played the winning continuation and won the game,
it would have gone down in history as his "Immortal" game.

Magnus wins again !! Get ready for two more years !!

So it turned out to be a blitz tournament, he got 3-0 in that part. Which doesn't take away from the slow games, they were every one very high level, almost computer level.

@64squaresofpain


Great commentary, thanks for the link.

In my book, Caruana demonstrated that he's on eye-level with the champion. A fine match.

PS Blitz is another game; too bad they got mixed up in this championship. Might as well mix up correspondence chess and world's championship.

@moonbus

Magnus is champion of Rapid chess. He is co-champion in classical chess..