2014 Candidates Openings

Congratulations to Viswanathan Anand on winning the 2014 Candidates Tournament, a result that was not widely expected before the event began. Now the chess world can look forward to Carlsen - Anand II later this year.

Before their first match I made an overview of the openings they had used against each other -- Anand - Carlsen Openings -- and thought it would be useful to make a similar overview for the just concluded candidates event. The numbers in the following table ('x56') show the number of times a particular move was played, e.g. '1.d4 x24' means 1.d4 was played 24 times during the event.

In this space last week I looked at the Sicilian Najdorf 6.h3 variation as played by the SuperGM crowd over the last decade. By the end of the tournament it had been played four times with a +1-0=3 result.