Agree. The use of Azeri oil money smells, it's enough for a while. I wonder why AGON couldn't collect more money from a much wider group of sponsors, or is AGON out? Besides, I think Radja needs a break to recover from whatever trouble of life and/or chess that hit him. Now Mamedyarov is closer to the Candidates, all by himself

Only in chess this seems to be a prime commodity. Yet not relied upon in all other sports...they need to qualify to the finals by playing in preliminaries. It is in this light that Efren Bata Reyes will be a greater sports hero than Magnus Carlsen can ever dreamed to be.

Lol, what are you talking about? I was merely pointing out that Radjabov who withdrew from two Grand Prix tournaments already, might be willing to play in the final one, because if he <wins> that tournament, he might help Mamedyarov, or even himself* (though <alexmagnus> hinted that that's not the case). If you read it as "hanky panky," then that's your problem. I personally don't see anything wrong with what I said. Sure he might not win, and yet decide the outcome for the others, but if there is something suspicious I'd be the first one to call it out. However I've seen nothing from Radjabov to hint that he'll be dropping games on purpose. And if players were to be encouraged for "hanky panky" by my posts, then Grischuk would be the one to benefit, as both Svidler and Karjakin will be playing, too.

Prime commodity? Hehe, rating qualifiers are actually a minority in all championship-related events (the only notable exception was the FIDE WC 2005). But the <winner> almost always comes from this minority :).

I agree.

http://www.chessvibes.com/reports/f...

Must be those precious points were paramount.

But Moro was rated lower than Grish and gained points with the draw ;-)

I am so looking forward to Grischuk repeating that tactic. xd A pity he will meet Le quite early.

It just shows that pre-World-Cup qualification stages, while exist, hardly play a role in the WC cycle (and that despite the majority of World Cup participants qualifying from those stages). The only exception is, as I already mentioned, Aronian - he won World Cup 2005 after qualifying to it through the European Championship 2004 - and then getting all the way to the 2007 WC tournament).

In the end, it's the journey that matters and not the destination- the end does not justify the means.

I agree..<nok> are you a genius or what?

Fischer's candidates matches were 10 or 12 games.

Of course, machines are getting better all the time, both hardware and software. Ask me again in 10 or maybe even 5 years' time and I might give you a different answer.

Engines are indeed relatively weak in the endgame, but I think the reason is not the horizon effect (how? in the endgame there are less pieces, so they can calculate much deeper), but faulty evaluation functions. Obviously, endgame positions require a different evaluation function that middlegame ones. After all, the horizon effect would not explain away the simplest endgame misjudgment possible: early versions of Rybka (if run without tablebases) evaluated a simple K+P vs K endgame in drawn case as +3. Although calculating all the way to stalemate doesn't require any big depth at all.

Surely for the system to be fair, everyone, no matter nationality, should be allowed to enter any zonal?

What it does imply is that if the engine picks the top, say, 5 moves at each ply because of its search heuristics, that the chances for the engine missing the best move in the minimax sense is greater in the middle game than in the endgame. That I believe is one reason why engines occasionally fail to find the best move in a given position and why, in addition to their different evaluation functions, different engines often come up with different principal variations. That and, of course, different search heuristics.

Still hoping that FIDE would go back to the old zonals interzonals Candidates format.

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