An Early Carlsen Dominance in Blitz

In June of 2014, the Norway Chess tournament near Stavanger, Norway held a blitz tournament before the main tournament to determine the pairings and colors for the main tournament. So, since these are blitz games, we use the blitz ratings.

Unfortunately, I am unable to get the blitz ratings list for June 2014. However, because Carlsen is here along with two players with higher ratings than himself, it should be fine to use this small list of blitz ratings (the blitz ratings of the players are provided) as the overall list. You see, I need the rating of the number two player in the world at the time to calculate the G-score (it allows comparison of G-scores across the eras of chess). So, Aronian’s rating of 2863 is extremely high and very likely is the number two rating in the world at the time. But, even if it isn’t, it is so high that it wouldn’t act much differently than the real number two rating even if we knew it. So, this tournament report shall stand until and unless we get the Blitz Rating List for June 2014.

With that in mind, here is my tournament report…

Notice in the Choke Test portion of the analysis, Karjakin is found to have choked! So, he was the favorite going into this thing. But, he survived, obviously, because he went on to win the main event.