The final event of the 2022 Meltwater Champions Chess Tour will pit the season’s best-performing players against one another in a round robin format. Magnus Carlsen has already clinched overall victory in the Tour thanks to his previous tournament victories, and he is expected to triumph at this event as well. The first day of play will pit him against 3-time US champion and world #8 Wesley So, who recently lost his Fischer Random Chess world championship title to Hikaru Nakamura.
The 2022 Meltwater Champions Chess Tour finals will take place in San Francisco’s Ferry Building, whose scenic panorama is sure to liven up shots of players as they play chess over computers. With half of the participants playing from the comfort of their home, this tournament is somewhere halfway between the previous in-person Majors and the regular online events in the Tour.
The Meltwater Champions Chess Tour finals: An overview
Eight of the best chess players in the world will face off against each other in the final event of the Tour in a seven-day round robin affair. The players will play each other once in mini-matches of four rapid games, with blitz and Armageddon tiebreakers at the ready should they be necessary to separate the players from each other.
World #1 (and soon-to-be-abdicating world champion) Magnus Carlsen has already clinched the Tour victory by virtue of racking up enough winnings across the previous events, and though he was a lock for this tournament for a very long time, he nominally earned his spot thanks to his victory at the Julius Bär Generation Cup. He’s joined by Polish phenom Jan-Krzysztof Duda, who’s second in the Tour standings and earned his spot by winning the Aimchess Rapid tournament. They’re joined by the runners-up from the two events, Arjun Erigaisi and Shakhriyar Mamedyarov, respectively.
The Tour’s #4 and #5 players, Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa and Lê Quang Liêm, earned their spots by virtue of their overall standing in the competition. To round out the field, Anish Giri and Wesley So received wildcard invites.
The event takes place between Nov. 14 and Nov. 20, with no rest day available to the players. Play begins each day at 14:00 CT. There is a beginner-friendly live commentary available on Chess24’s YouTube and Twitch channels featuring David Howell and Simon Williams, the usual crew of GMs, alongside IM Jovanka Houska. More advanced analysis feed is provided by GMs Péter Lékó and Rustam Kasimdzhanov on separate channels.
Round one will pit Carlsen against So, who recently won the Chess.com Global Championships, with Duda going up against Erigaisi, Pragg facing Mamedyarov and Liem aiming for a three-peat against Giri after two previous convincing victories in the Tour.
Everything you need to know about the Meltwater Champions Chess Tour
The Meltwater Champions Chess Tour is a series of online chess tournaments that were initially branded as the Magnus Carlsen Chess Tour. The events were created in 2020 from scratch in order to provide the top players in the world with a competitive avenue during the pandemic when holding offline events and travelling became impossible.
The Tour’s popularity led to its expansion, and now it has become a regular fixture of the chess calendar, morphing into a season-long string of interconnected events. The 2022 season was made up of six regular online and three major offline chess tournaments, all leading up to this grand final in San Francisco.
Per Meltwater’s reach data relayed via chessbase.com, “the Tour generated 22 billion in media reach in 2021 and 58 billion so far in 2022, representing 164 per cent year over year growth on an already record-breaking inaugural season.”
Previous events in the Tour included the Julius Bär Generation Cup, the FTX Crypto Cup and the FTX Road to Miami tournament. With the Play Magnus Group soon to be bought out by chess.com and the regular cryptocurrency exchange sponsor going down the drain, the Tour will likely see a significant overhaul for its next season, should it return.
