Yesterday the 2018 Berlin Candidates Tournament finished with a clear winner, no tiebreaks necessary. Congratulations to Fabiano Caruana on earning the right to challenge World Champion Magnus Carlsen next November in a title match.
Two years ago, after Sergey Karjakin won the 2016 Moscow Candidate's Tournament, I worked on a series of posts to learn more about him:-
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2016-04-11:
Karjakin's TWIC Debut
... - 2016-06-13: GM Karjakin's Early Career • Summary of all posts
Now I'd like to do something similar for GM Caruana. Since he's an English-speaking Westerner, his career has been covered more closely by the Western press than Karjakin's career at a similar point.
On this blog, the first post about him appears to have been The Class of 1990 (October 2009):-
I created the following chart, showing the FIDE ratings [the young stars] attained at equivalent ages. It's a little rough because the rating updates don't coincide with birthdays, but I think it gives a good idea of how the players progressed.
On my World Chess Championship blog, the first non-trivial post was Gelfand and His Colleagues (November 2012):-
Q: And what about Caruana? • A: I played with him last at Wijk aan Zee, and it was after this that he made his big leap forward, so it is not easy for me to summarise him today. It seems to me that he also has incredible concentration. He is calculating variations the whole time, like a kind of computer, with a sort of enhanced processor. No, I really have no idea. He has great confidence, you can feel it. [...]
Of course, there's much more to be said about the next challenger to World Champion Carlsen. I'll explore Caruana's early career in a short series of posts.
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