From Kalmykia To Mexico

I can't wait much longer. The World Chess Championship Candidates Matches begin in Elista, Kalmykia, today. Four places for the Championship itself, in Mexico City, are at stake.

The match pairings themselves are a treat.

1. Levon Aronian v Magnus Carlsen

2. Peter Leko v Mikhail Gurevich

3. Ruslan Ponomariov v Sergei Rublevsky

4. Boris Gelfand v Rustam Kasimdzhanov

5. Etienne Bacrot v Gata Kamsky

6. Alexander Grischuk v Vladimir Malakhov

7. Judith Polgar v Evgeny Bareev

8. Alexei Shirov v Michael Adams

These sixteen players come from all over the place (although traditional chess-playing countries dominate): Armenia (1), England (1), France (1), Hungary (2), Israel (1), Norway (1), Russia (4), Spain (1), Turkey (1), Ukraine (1), USA (1), Uzbekistan (1). It's hard, without a chess database, to guess who comes from where. Casual blog-readers are invited to guess. Avid chess-players ought to know; after all, these are 16 of the world's best. Linguists will probably guess about half of them right. The main problem is the legacy of the Soviet hegemony and the subsequent diaspora. Heh. Politics – it crops up everywhere.