Candidates Tournament 2016

The Candidates Tournament 2016 was an eight-player double round-robin chess tournament, held in Moscow, Russia, from 11–30 March 2016. The winner, Sergey Karjakin, earned the right to challenge the defending world champion, Magnus Carlsen of Norway, in the World Chess Championship 2016. The result was decided in the final round when Karjakin defeated runner-up Fabiano Caruana.

FIDE's commercial partner Agon was the official organizer, with support from the Russian Chess Federation. The main sponsor was the Tashir Group, a Russian real estate company headed by Armenian-born businessman Samvel Karapetyan.

The tournament was contested as a double round-robin with each player playing 14 games. Four rest days took place after rounds 3, 6, 9, and 12. The winner of this 8-player candidates tournament would be the challenger of Magnus Carlsen at the 2016 World Chess Championship. At the DI Central Telegraph Building, Agon had designed and built a 20000 square-foot space near the Kremlin to woo more spectators to the sport, with 99% of the focus on online viewership. As the official organizer, they owned live moves and video broadcasing rights. Legal actions were commenced against sites who had acted otherwise.

The prize fund (Regulations 3.8.1) was 420,000 euros, with 95,000 to the winner, 88,000 to second, 75,000 to third, down to 17,000 for last place. Prize money would be divided equally between players on the same score.

The FIDE supervisor was Zurab Azmaiparashvili and the chief arbiter was Werner Stubenvoll from Austria.

There were five different qualification paths to the Candidates Tournament. In order of priority, these were: loser of the World Chess Championship 2014 match, the top two finishers in the Chess World Cup 2015, the top two finishers in the FIDE Grand Prix 2014–15, next two highest rated players (average FIDE rating on the 12 monthly lists from January to December 2015, with at least 30 games played) who played in Chess World Cup 2015 or FIDE Grand Prix 2014–15, and one player nominated by the organizers (Agon).

...
Wikipedia