3 min readMar 29, 2026 12:30 PM IST
Tournament favourite Fabiano Caruana believes while chess engines haven’t changed since he played in the last of his three Candidates outings, but analysis certainly has. Speaking on the CSQ podcast ahead of his opener against Hikaru Nakamura, Caruana with a tight crop told the C-Squared pod that some things had changed from the last time in 2024.
“It’s different because openings are different, you know, uh just opening preparation is very different . It’s different from 2024, even from Toronto,” he would say.
The changes are nuanced but could play out dramatically on the board. “It’s still a pretty similar era. Same engines, but engines got a bit different in terms of how they evaluate certain positions but yeah the opening trends are not too different from two years ago,” the American red hot favourite would say.
Given the whole vibe of Chess with Magnus Carlsen ushering in the very refreshing concept of “getting bored” into the sport, which pushes GMs to think out the box Caruana said computers stayed just as they are, humans craved new openings.
“More or less people shift from one um fashion let’s say to the other which doesn’t have much to do necessarily with the strength of the engines but just sometimes you get bored with something. People get bored, they then see people are playing something, they get inspired to check it then everyone’s checking the same opening. Suddenly they all want to play it and that’s just how trends work but things have not changed drastically from 2024 or even 2022 although definitely analysis has gotten … analysis of openings has changed in last four years,” Caruana told C-SQ.
However the last decade has seen a massive change. “Huge difference from 2016 and 2018. In 2016 everyone just played the Berlin and that was a given. I spent most of my time preparing for Berlin in 2016,” he recalled.
There was one instance when Anish Giri disrupted preparations, like Feed & George Weasley’s dungbomb fireworks. “Playing Anish in first round with black, we drew. Then when I played Anish in second round I used our big idea in the anti-Berlin. He made one move which he hadn’t checked. Ended up being better for black after the move. So engine miscalculated the position. Anish refuted engine analysis over the board. So I was immediately worse at white without messing anything up. Just playing our preparation which was wrong because engine misled us. Later I got some advantage and turned it into a draw,” he recalled the game.
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He was forced into a scramble. “Then I prepared a completely losing variation against Anish in second half, sacrificed four pawns which was two too many at least, maybe even four many,” he said, of how Candidates’ can turn.
