The Week in Chess

Magnus Carlsen and Viswanathan Anand spent the day before their match starts on Saturday 8th November performing their various duties as the players. First of all there was the player's meeting, then a press conference and finally the opening ceremony. You can rewatch the videos of the press conference and opening ceremony on the Official FIDE Video Channel for the Sochi World Chess Championship as well as future coverage.

The press conference saw both players looking well but both seemed fairly tense. Their prospects?

"I'm ready to give it another shot, that's all I can say." Anand

Carlsen on being favourite "Seriously, it doesn't really matter... if you don't play well you're not going to win."

The seconds can give away a player's strategy. Both will have prepared with people they're not prepared to talk about but some of the names are known so Carlsen and Anand didn't hide the names of his seconds: Krishnana Sasikiran, Radoslaw Wojtaszek and Grzegorz Gajewski.

Carlsen was more oblique but his major helpers are well known. "The Dane and the Hammer." (Peter Heine Nielsen and Jon Ludvig Hammer). VG Sport says Nielsen is in Sochi with Carlsen and Hammer is at an undisclosed location. Last year Hammer worked via Skype and wasn't in India.

Finally there was the opening ceremony where the main issue at stake after the speeches and national anthems was the draw for colours. Black and White balloons were pricked by a magician and doves appeared. It wasn't clear to me at all how they ensured this was random but probably there's no advantage either way. Anand will have white in games 1 and 12 if they reach that stage. Carlsen will have white in games 6 and 7. This is so the players have white after a rest day a roughly equal number of times. VG Sport claimed black in the first game was Carlsen's Dream start.

Boris Spassky was at the opening ceremony and sad to say he was in a wheel chair and looked in poor health, almost unrecognisable to me even from his 2009 match against Korchnoi which seems destined to be his last chess.

The other issue was the lack of a screen between the players and the audience. Carlsen commented that things weren't finished yet but seemed satisfactory. "I think that would be a good way to do it [glass division], but it wasn’t possible this time so we had to find another solution."

Game 1 Saturday 8th November 2014. 3pm local time 12pm GMT. Anand vs Carlsen

Game 2 Sunday 9th November 2014. 3pm local time 12pm GMT. Carlsen vs Anand. Please join me on ICC on Sunday with GM John Fedorowicz.