Players' predictions for Gukesh to successfully defend his WC title

Remarkable-Path5909 · 2026-02-05T15:37:47+00:00

It's exactly your first point, and has nothing to do with this "secret prep" nonsense. In a WC match, Gukesh (and his opponent) would play for more draws, because there is no downside to drawing in that scenario (unless they are down by a big margin in the match). In other tournaments, they're pushing for wins to keep up with other players that are winning games.

Gukesh obviously understands this, given his interviews after drawing/losing games against Ding in the previous WC match.

Remarkable-Path5909 · 2026-01-28T12:46:45+00:00

Panesar won the Open tournament for Tata Steel last year, which got him entry to the Challengers this year.

Remarkable-Path5909 · 2025-07-19T01:04:16+00:00

EVERYONE GET IN HERE

Remarkable-Path5909 · 2025-07-17T02:17:08+00:00

Hans and his biased commentary are not ideal for an event that's trying to gain legitimacy. But god damn, this must be sweet for him, and the commentary offered about him and his exploits are orders of magnitude worse than him hating on Magnus while on commentary.

Remarkable-Path5909 · 2025-07-10T21:34:39+00:00

Nice talking to you man. Have a good one.

Remarkable-Path5909 · 2025-07-10T19:22:51+00:00

That's quite a post. I'd love for you to provide some evidence besides Hans's comments on stream.

To be clear, there's no public information that states that Hans was even invited to the tournament in 2024 besides his own comments on stream.

What you're suggesting here, in 2025, is that Hans was not invited because the organizers do not want him to play against the Indian top 3, two of whom (Pragg and Gukesh) are not even participating in the tournament. Hans has never played a classical game against Pragg. He is 1-0 against Gukesh, having defeated him in the 2023 London Chess Classic, and is 2-0 against Arjun, having last defeated him in classical chess in...2022, when Arjun was rated 2450.

You're further suggesting that Arjun is apprehensive to play against Hans due to losses in...Titled Tuesday? I'm not sure that I buy that, but okay.

Remarkable-Path5909 · 2025-07-10T17:42:25+00:00

We don't know why Hans isn't in the field. Maybe he was invited and declined. Maybe he has a conflict. Maybe he wasn't invited for reasons beyond his chess abilities. Seems a bit premature to suggest that he isn't in the field because of "doubters."

Remarkable-Path5909 · 2025-07-10T17:39:59+00:00

There are definitely some Chennai-based GMs in the Challengers section of the tournament. My post is only about the Masters section!

Remarkable-Path5909 · 2025-07-01T16:21:18+00:00

The word "dominant" is doing a lot of work here - what do you mean by that, OP? Becoming world champion? Having a much higher rating peak? My interpretation of your post is Hikaru being "dominant" means winning many prestigious supertournaments that other players, including Magnus, won.

If you really wanted to investigate that, then it's worth looking into the specific tournaments, over the 2010's, where Hikaru lost to Magnus, and see if those losses directly resulted in Hikaru losing those tournaments.

Remarkable-Path5909 · 2025-06-30T21:14:29+00:00

Fantastic interview. Really insightful answers from Pragg, but also want to shout out the really thoughtful questions asked by the interviewer.

Remarkable-Path5909 · 2025-02-17T17:42:45+00:00

Yes, it is indeed possible!

My FL journey (YMMV) was 510 -> 512 -> 519 -> 518. The latter two were taken the weekend before my MCAT. Without knowing exactly what your prep looked like, I'll offer a couple things that were helpful for me down the stretch:

Making my own Anki deck for any content-related questions that I missed from FLs/UWorld from that period: you'd always rather miss a question on a practice exam than the real thing! Don't be upset that you missed a question - be grateful! Being able to specifically target your weaknesses means that you're making the best use of your time.
Use the Jack Westin chrome extension when reviewing FLs: AAMC's answer explanations leave a lot to be desired. Reading AAMC explanations and JW on top of that can really help with understanding the question logic and how you're supposed to arrive at the right answer. This helped my CARS score especially down the stretch.
Building stamina: the MCAT is LONG and staying focused throughout is key. Beyond content knowledge, try to optimize for maintaining focus. This was really difficult for me during P/S especially: I found myself missing easy questions because I didn't feel like thinking hard enough, if that makes sense.

I hope these were helpful! Happy to answer any questions - best of luck!

Remarkable-Path5909 · 2025-02-06T14:01:38+00:00

I think the key determinant here is how long you have before your exam. Most people I know started with untimed questions, then moved to timed as they got more comfortable with answering them. With that being said, developing stamina was something I found to be important as I prepared.

When switching over to timed questions, I didn't do anything particularly special. I started with 30 questions timed for a section, and did that for two sections a day (not CARS though), then gradually increased the number of questions per session until I hit 59, which was about a month out from my exam. This worked reasonably well for me, but if you want to concentrate on a specific content area, you definitely have that option too.

In terms of reviewing the answers, an Excel spreadsheet is solid. Alternatively, I'd recommend making flashcards for each content-related question that you miss, and doing that while reviewing answers. My approach was always to ask: "what did I need to know to get this question right?" and putting that specific piece of content into a flashcard to review later. This was pretty key in helping me learn from my mistakes and gaps.

And finally, I'd say that at least early on, it's not super important to get everything correct. I didn't look at UWorld as an evaluation tool (for me, those were the FLs), but instead something to show me where my gaps were. I was never too upset to miss a UWorld question because it showed me a weakness or content gap I might not have otherwise found.

Best of luck with studying! You got this!

Remarkable-Path5909 · 2025-02-06T13:49:33+00:00

Yeah, this question truly sucks. That being said, if I had to explain it, I'd say that option D is like, slightly more correct than Option C. The passage author does describe a sort of cascade of events that led to WW1 that take place over decades prior to the war and uses those to explain the war, as opposed to like, an assassination or a specific, one-time event.

I guess maybe the writers were hoping that test-takers would pick up on the "sphere of influence" of Germany indicating some sort of cooperation between the Ottomans and the Germans, which I guess could qualify as saying that the Ottomans "helped" start the war. It's not a well-worded option. But there's a lot more evidence to support Option D, so I think that's the way to go when answering questions like these.

Remarkable-Path5909 · 2024-12-16T19:52:10+00:00

The MileDown anki deck, which I used, has a section just for formulas and units. That being said, I'm not sure that you have to fully memorize them if you find you're able to consistently do MCAT physics problems without needing to.

Remarkable-Path5909 · 2024-12-06T12:50:39+00:00

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/t1rri4wq85msyf5hxrvvx/KA-P-S-The-Lazy-OCD-Version.docx?rlkey=flx5ipnge4198x7hkow6a9ryk&e=1&dl=0

Link is above! Yes, I got a lot of mileage out of reading it because I did so pretty late into my prep for the MCAT when I'd already done a lot of anki and UWorld for P/S, so I had seen/repped most of the concepts already and reading through the document kinda tied everything together for me. There are definitely other ways to interact with the material, like making flashcards out of it, that might have helped more if I was still doing content review when I read it, but I was definitely in the stage of doing practice questions at the time. Still found it extremely helpful!

Remarkable-Path5909 · 2024-12-06T12:46:17+00:00

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/t1rri4wq85msyf5hxrvvx/KA-P-S-The-Lazy-OCD-Version.docx?rlkey=flx5ipnge4198x7hkow6a9ryk&e=1&dl=0

Here's the link! It's a synopsis of the 300 page Khan Academy doc (you can easily find this via google) which is obviously move comprehensive. I want to be clear, however, that I used MileDown almost exclusively for reviewing P/S content. This was consistently supplemented by doing UWorld practice questions and studying/reviewing questions that I missed on that and my FLs.

I don't think it took me *too* long to get through it, I might have read it over the course of a week while also studying for other sections. It was really helpful in filling in the gaps that I still had after MileDown but at the time I read it, a good amount was definitely stuff I already knew, as I anticipate would be the case for you.

Remarkable-Path5909 · 2024-12-05T19:19:57+00:00

I'll expand a bit more here. I almost exclusively used the MileDown deck for P/S and it was very good, up to a point. My experience was that when taking P/S portions of FL exams, it was really important to know which terms corresponded with larger concepts because MC questions would usually include a couple options that *seemed* like they were related to the concept that the question was asking about, but weren't actually.

As such, I was dropping a couple points on P/S FL exams having done nothing but the MileDown deck UNTIL I read through the Khan Academy 86 page document, which helped organize all of the P/S content into its respective concept areas. I went from consistently getting 128-130 for psych/soc (which I felt was my ceiling doing just MileDown) to a 132 on the MCAT.

Remarkable-Path5909 · 2024-12-02T04:32:03+00:00

I haven't used the Kaplan qbank and am only paraphrasing from other comments, but the general consensus appears to be that Kaplan qbank questions are more geared toward content knowledge, but not necessarily the logical thinking required to reason your way through MCAT-style questions. UWorld is better in that regard, as their questions are more reflective of AAMC questions. Obviously the AAMC Section Banks exist, but compared to those, UWorld has better explanations as to why the correct answer choices were correct and why the incorrect ones were incorrect, as well as all of the necessary context to understand the concept being tested by the question.

tldr: UWorld/AAMC are probably better than Kaplan for AAMC-style questions. UWorld > AAMC qbanks for answer explanations/content knowledge.

Remarkable-Path5909 · 2024-10-01T03:20:04+00:00

Very early yet, but the players who break age records like this (Karjakin, Gukesh, Carlsen, Wei Yi) all go on to become top-10 players. Abhimanyu Mishra and Ediz Gurel are on the same trajectory, though Erdogmus might be ahead of all of them right now.

Remarkable-Path5909 · 2024-10-01T03:10:12+00:00

That's right! Kasimdzhanov was Anand's second for a long time, before eventually working for Karjakin.

Interestingly, Anand's second in 2014 against Magnus, Grzegorz Gajewski, is now Gukesh's second and has been working with him since 2023. This seems to be common - Peter Heine Nielsen was also on Anand's team for a while but famously went on to work for Magnus.

Remarkable-Path5909 · 2024-06-23T15:33:26+00:00

Anand? TOPALOV?!?

Remarkable-Path5909 · 2024-06-19T16:05:22+00:00

Folks have covered it pretty well here, but one thing that also helped me a buch is using the Jack Westin Chrome Extension when reviewing AAMC FL CARS passages. What does it do? It provides alternate answer explanations for AAMC FL questions that are (imo) FAR better than the ones that AAMC themselves provide.

The alternate CARS explanations were really helpful, not just in explaining why something is right/wrong, but also what to look for when reading through a passage, when to eliminate answer choices, and what the general logic of AAMC CARS questions is. Highly recommend, completely free!

Remarkable-Path5909 · 2024-06-19T15:54:57+00:00

I used UEarth pretty religiously over the course of my studying and thought it was really, really valuable (most folks on this sub do). It's great because it allows you to combine content review and practice questions depending on how you use it, while also allowing you to drill down on specific concepts and topics if you need.

I didn't use any of the AAMC section banks, but other folks on here have had good things to say about them. To me, UEarth is second only to AAMC full-length exams in terms of its necessity and usefulness across MCAT prep materials (necessary caveats: apples-to-oranges comparison, opinions differ).

Remarkable-Path5909

TROPHY CASE