Two Championship Qualifying Events

After ending the series of 'Interview Videos' with last week's post on World Champion Carlsen, I had planned to return to the series of posts about engines. The previous series ended with AlphaGo Netflix (January 2018), and was summarized in Interview Videos : Aronian (ditto). As the first, partial crosstable below shows (from TCEC - Live Computer Chess Broadcast), the recent post TCEC Season 11 in Full Swing (March 2018) hasn't played out completely, but Stockfish and Houdini are headed for the final stage, barring a catastrophic breakdown of either engine.

An even more important world class event, the 2018 Berlin Candidates Tournament, is also reaching its climax and here the results are anything but clear. As the second crosstable above shows, courtesy TWIC's coverage of the FIDE Candidates Tournament 2018, five players are bunched within a half-point of each other. The third chart above shows the pairings for the last two rounds, courtesy 2018 FIDE Candidates' Tournament Pairings (fide.com).