2016 Candidates - Round 10

Caruana defeated Anand, tying with Karjakin for the lead.

Methodology

2016 Candidates - Round 9

The big news in the last 3 rounds is Anand's victory over Aronian. Meanwhile, Caruana beat Nakamura, so he is well within striking distance of the leaders, Anand and Karjakin.

Methodology

2016 Candidates Tournament - Round 6

Anand bounced back impressively, winning a miniature against Svidler. Meanwhile, Aronian defeated Nakamura to join Karjakin in first place.

Methodology

Meanwhile on ChessBase, there is another set of predictions using computer simulations (http://en.chessbase.com/post/computer-simulates-and-predicts-candidates-winner). Our methods differ a bit, though the predictions are fairly similar. They estimated the draw rates using a database of recent games between the players. This is a smaller sample than in my model, and there is the difficulty of deciding how recent the games have to be in order to be relevant for this tournament. However, it might be able to approximate the effect of different styles. For example, even when Giri and Topalov have similar ratings and face similar opponents, they may still have different draw rates. Is it better to estimate this effect with a small sample (knowing that small samples can be unreliable) than it is to ignore it, as my model does? At the moment, it's hard to say. Once the university upgrades my computer, I might be able to get an answer. Their model also uses deep learning, which is something I don't know very much about.

I have not tried to estimate the results of the tiebreaks. For many tournaments, the tiebreak rules seem to be complicated or arbitrary. If it comes down to rapid and blitz games, the databases don't have a lot of reliable data on that yet.

2016 Candidates Tournament - Round 5

Karjakin defeated Anand in Round 4. All the other games in that round and in Round 5 ended in draws.

Notably, after Anand's loss, he is no longer the #1 player in India. According to the Live Ratings, Harikrishna is slightly ahead. Another big change in the Live Ratings: Topalov is no longer in the top 10.

Methodology

2016 Candidates Tournament - Round 3

Anand managed to win his first round game, echoing his performance in the previous Candidates Tournament. In rounds 2 and 3, Karjakin and Aronian caught up.

Methodology

2016 Candidates Tournament

The 2016 Candidates Tournament starts in about a week. It is a double round robin with a very strong field, even though World #2 Kramnik is missing. That leaves Caruana as the favorite, though his chances are only slightly better than those of his closest rivals.

Methodology

2016 Tata Steel - Round 10

Caruana defeated Yi and now trails by just half a point.

Methodology

I have been working on a chess project off and on for the last several months (or maybe it has been a year by now). The goal was to find if the draw rate after 1.d4 is higher than after 1.e4. Just looking at the average draw rate can be misleading; in this article, I found that White tends to play 1.e4 when he is the underdog and 1.d4 when he is the favorite.

Unfortunately, the computer I'm using can't handle the massive dataset. They won't upgrade my work computer for at least a few months, so the project will be delayed. The results might help me improve the forecasts a bit.