17 December 2021

Carlsen's TMER 2019-21, Checkpoint

It's been more than four months since I started to update Magnus Carlsen's Tournament, Match, and Exhibition Record (TMER; 2000-), and I'm still not close to making the final update. In the first post listed below (08-06), I wrote,

My deadline for updating the TMER will be the start of the 2021 Carlsen - Nepomniachtchi title match.

The match finished a week ago; so much for arbitrary deadlines. That first post listed the work I did in 2018 for the previous update. At that time there were a total of six posts, compared to 16 so far in 2021. Why the big difference? I see three reasons: 1) The current update covers a span of three years instead of two years in 2018; 2) The covid-provoked move to online events in 2020 inspired a number of new tournament formats that are more complicated to document; 3) I'm getting slower. Here's the list of posts:-

Reviewing the three posts on Chess24 banter blitz -- 09-17, 11-19, 12-03 -- the events can be covered on the TMER in four entries: Match with Peter Svidler, Banter Blitz Cup 2019, Banter Series 2020, and Banter Blitz against Chess24 users (x16). That answers the question in the last post (12-03):-

The 16 sessions with Premium members plus 11 matches against titled players probably adds up to something like 300 Banter Blitz games to date. How much of that should go into the TMER?

As for the three posts on the two tours -- 08-27, 10-22, 12-10 -- all events in each tour deserve an entry: Magnus Carlsen Chess Tour 2020 (x5 events), Meltwater Champions Chess Tour 2020-21 (x7, played through the cutoff point for the TMER update). The Preliminary and Final stages for each event can be combined into a single entry.

The single post on the Lichess events -- 10-29 -- might not be sufficient to proceed with the TMER. I already have an earlier event on the TMER missing all details ('2018-02 LiChess Meetup Stjernen 2018') plus nine newer entries. The post mentions '15 Titled Arenas'. I closed the post saying,

Since Carlsen also played a few such ['Titled Arena'] events which he didn't win, it would take some effort to locate all of the 'Titled Arena' events he played. Given that they were bullet tournaments lasting only a few hours, I could probably just summarize them for now; idem for the bullet matches.

Two of the bullet matches were against Alireza Firouzja. Since he is currently a person of interest involving Carlsen's future plans -- for background see the post 2021 Carlsen - Nepomniachtchi, the Third Week (December 2021), on my World Chess Championship blog -- those matches take on additional importance. His name came up in four separate posts in the TMER series : 08-27, 09-17, 10-29, 12-03.

Looks like I'm still a long way from updating the Carlsen TMER. What a chess player!

***

Later: After I wrote this post, which was part of a Friday series, I took a break for the next few Fridays, starting Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve. I finally returned to Friday blogging, but needed to tackle a more urgent project. When I come back to the Carlsen TMER, here's a summary of the next step(s):-

The single post on the Lichess events -- 10-29 -- might not be sufficient to proceed with the TMER. [...] Two of the [Lichess] bullet matches were against Alireza Firouzja. Since he is currently a person of interest involving Carlsen's future plans [...] those matches take on additional importance.

It's possible that Firouzja will fizzle when his big test starts in June; see Candidates Tournament to take place in Madrid sponsored by Chess.com for details. He is currently ranked world no.2, behind Carlsen.

Posted by Mark Weeks at 12/17/2021 05:30:00 PM

Labels: , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)