The names of three candidates are already known: Anand, who lost the match for the crown to Carlsen and two Americans – Nakamura and Caruana, the winners of the FIDE Grand Prix, so the Cup is not as important for them as for the others. Two more candidates will be announced in Baku, another duo of two top rated, and the eighth will be named by the country that will host the Candidates Tournament, scheduled for March 2016.
Matches consist of two games with classical time control, and when the score is 1: 1 on the third day, the tie-break will be held in the Rapid and Blitz – six games in total. When the score is 4: 4, "Armageddon" or "Death Match" game is played. Whites have 5 minutes,blacks has 4, but draw is in their favor (four games instead of two are provided in the final).
By the way, though all the chess luminaries gathered in Baku except Carlsen and Anand, at every stage someone goes home. Thus, Kamsky and Gelfand, world champion Muzichuk were unlucky in the first round, Aronian and former champion Hou Yifan failed in the second round, the third round was the last one for Grischuk.
Next stage brought together two finalists of the previous Cup – Kramnik and Andreykin. The both classic games ended quite peacefully: in Rapid Vladimir failed to win a point with whites, but failed to achieve a draw with blacks. So Dmitri took revenge by knocking out former holder of the Cup, and depriving him of the candidate's travel. Now Kramnik needs to hope for his ranking, but there's also no lack of competitors.
The highly dramatic battle proceeded between Nakamura and Nepomnyastchy. Rapid Classic did not reveal the winner. Hikaru won the first batch of blitz, then Yang revenged almost by iracle; demoralized American relented both in the first game and in the next match of the blitz as well, but finally pulled himself together and revenged "a la carte".