The Candidates Tournament is almost halfway over and little by little it will be known which players are to be winners or simply to gain experience in an extremely complicated tournament. Two of the greatest favorites are the Americans Hikaru Nakamura and Fabiano Caruana, who closely follow the leader Ian Nepomniachtchi.
On the side of the famous youtuber and streamer, Hikaru Nakamura, he shares third place with Richard Rapport with 3 points in 6 games, 1.5 points behind Nepomniachtchi, but in the fifth round he let a great opportunity pass after drawing with the leader in a game in which he had a better position.
Fabiano Caruana is the player who most closely follows the Russian (at the moment he is 0.5 points below), especially in the sixth round when he beat Alireza Firoujza with black. However, in the same round, Carlsen‘s last challenger defeated Jan-Krzysztof Duda keeping the difference over Caruana, who nevertheless remains one of the strongest candidates to win the tournament.
Player performance in the 2022 Candidates Tournament
Although this is a hard tournament that still has 8 rounds to play in which anything could happen, it is clear that the performance of the first two players so far is well above the rest of the participants. In this way, Ian Nepomniachtchi and Fabiano Caruana reaffirm their favoritism in this candidates’ tournament.
In the 6 games played so far, the Russian has had a performance of 2970 rating (comparable to the performance of Anatoly Karpov in the famous Linares 1994), while the American, 2903. Hikaru Nakamura, the other American, has had a more than acceptable performance of 2783 rating, although of course far from the first two places.
Ding Liren, who before the start was one of the main favorites, for the moment has obtained 2.5 points and a performance of 2709, a little far from what was expected of him, although in his favor it must be said that in the last tournament of Candidates had a bad start and then recovered. Alireza Firouzja, the only player against whom Carlsen would agree to defend the title in his own words, is currently last with 2 points and a 2641 performance.
How does the 2022 Candidates tournament continue?
The 2022 Candidates Tournament, in which the challenger of the world champion Magnus Carlsen will be defined, continues this Saturday, June 25 with round 7 (click here to see which will be the matchups and standings of the tournament after 6 rounds).
