Not much has been made of the forthcoming candidates tournament, but it’s one of the major chess events of the year. It’s scheduled to run March 1st to the 30th in Moscow. It’s a double round-robin among eight players to choose the official challenger to world champion Magnus Carlsen. The players are: Viswanathan Anand of India, Sergey Karjakin and Peter Svidler of Russia, Anish Giri of the Netherlands, Veselin Topalov of Bulgaria, and Fabiano Caruana and Hikaru Nakamura of the United States. And since the sponsor of the event is the Tashir Group, a Russian real estate development firm owned by Samvel Karapetyan of Armenia, the organizer’s choice is Levon Aronian also of Armenia. The winner will play Carlsen sometime this November. The location is currently not known but FIDE has long declared that it would be somewhere in America. It would be great if it does end up here, but we have great doubts. Most likely it will end up in some remote, very cold, eastern location which is par for the FIDE course.

The always favorite US Amateur Team Championship East, or as the New Jersey organizers call it the “World Team Championship,’’ has just concluded. More than 1,100 players joined into about 275 teams converged on the Hilton Inn in Parsippany, N.J., over Presidents’s day weekend. At the end of the six-round event, the young New York team (average age of 14) “Summer Chess Academy for Talented Youth I’’ won the eastern title. The best Massachusetts team was “f3 + g4 The Right Wing Agenda’’ with Mika Brattain, Andrew Liu, Siddharth Arun, and Eddie Wei, with 4 points. The highest scoring Mass player was 10-year-old Bernie Xu with 5.5 points. The “Summer Chess Academy’’ will now play the winning teams from the South, North, and West regions on the Internet Chess Club (www.chessclub.com) for the national title.

Winners: Spiegel Cup Series at Makor Chess, 14&U: 1st: Kevin James Chen: 3.5-.5, 2nd: Daniel Farfel, 3-1, 3rd: Vittal Ranganath: 2.5-.1.5; 11&U: 1st: Mark Chudnovsky: 3.5-.5, 2nd: Nicholas Belous: 3-1, 3rd: Tim Guan: 2.5-1.5; 8&U: 1st: Justin Y. Li: 3.5-.5, 2nd: Tristan Pritchard: 3-1, 3rd: Edmund Pritchard: 2.5-1.5; Waltham CC’s Levin, G/30: 1st: Todd Chase: 3.5-.5 2nd-3rd: Lawyer Times, Robert J. King: 3-1;

Coming events: Boylston Thursday Night Swiss, March, 3, 10, 17, 24, and 31, Boylston Chess Club, 40 Norris St., Cambridge, www.BoylstonChessClub.org; 2016 Rhode Island Scholastic State Championship, (open to out-of-state players) March 5, Rhode Island College, Donovan Cafeteria - Behind Mann Hall, 600 Mt. Pleasant Ave., Providence, 02908, SenecaChess.org;

Answer to today’s problem: 1…RxN! 2.QxR (2.exR leads to mate after 2…Qe1+) 2…Rd8! and now if 3.QxQ then 3…Rd1 is mate.