The FIDE Chess.com Online Nations Cup 2020
Ask and ye shall receive, as a very wise man once said. Writing my wrap-up on the Magnus Carlsen Invitational finale, I wished for another strong online event in the near future. Tomorrow - already today, in the Old World - qualifies: the FIDE Chess.com Online Nations Cup starts Tuesday, May 5 and runs through Saturday, May 10. There are six teams: Russia, USA, Europe, China, India, and a Rest of the World squad. Carlsen isn't playing, but there are few other prominent players missing. Six of the eight Candidates are playing (Fabiano Caruana, Ding Liren, Ian Nepomniachtchi, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Anish Giri, and Wang Hao are there; only Alexander Grischuk and Kiril Alekseenko will be absent - or rather, fail to log on), plus shoulda-been Candidate Teimour Radjabov. Other superstars include Viswanathan Anand, Levon Aronian, Sergey Karjakin, Hikaru Nakamura, Wesley So, Leinier Dominguez, Vladislav Artemiev, Jan-Krzysztof Duda, and Alireza Firouzja, and there are plenty more. (You can find the full list here.) It should be ridiculously strong and plenty entertaining.
The time control will be 25'+10", which should lead to better play than we saw over this past week, and I'm assuming that it's a round-robin with a double-round each day, so the players get a crack at each other with both colors. That takes care of the first five days; apparently the top two teams will duke it out on the last day for the championship title. If it was only a men's competition I would semi-joke that the final would see the U.S. taking on the best of the rest, but there are two women's boards as well, and the U.S. women are the lowest-rated by far. (Why not have separate, concurrent men's/open and women's events?) So we're probably shooting for a third-place finish.