Carlsen's Events 2017-18

With a World Championship match due to start in less than two months, it's a good time to return to Magnus Carlsen's Tournament, Match, and Exhibition Record (TMER; 'Last updated 2016-09-26'). I'll follow the same pattern used in the previous cycle of updates that started two years ago with Carlsen's Events 2015-16 (September 2016).

Since the last event on the TMER is currently '2016-09 42nd Olympiad, Baku AZE', I searched all issues of TWIC following that Olympiad and discovered 564 'Carlsen' games. Eight of those were played by Magnus's father, leaving 556 games by the reigning World Champion.

The following table shows the main events that Carlsen played in the last two years along with a count of games for each event. Because of limited space, the table isn't complete, e.g. events that included both rapid and blitz show only a count for the rapid games.

The corresponding TWIC search for the 2015-16 update located *only* 282 Carlsen games. Why the large increase? It appears that many of the games played in 2017-18 were for Chess.com online events. The world's leading website for chess started organizing events at the highest level in 2016.