I don’t know what this format was all about, but it certainly had an impact on the Live Ratings. Caruana gained 47.2 Rapid-Elo and 32.2 Blitz-Elo, Nakamura lost 20.8 Rapid-Elo and gained 44.0 Blitz-Elo, and So gained 13 Rapid-Elo and lost 76.8 Blitz-Elo. Playing rather long matches against carefully selected opponents as a clear favorite cerainly looks like stat padding to me. One could also call it a simple case of rating manipulation, because the “targets” don’t get invitations to the top tournaments on a regular basis. The results show that it doesn’t always work, especially when the opponent refuses to roll over without a fight, and there is also some short term luck, even in chess, but there is a risk in everything. By the way, one such mismatch is enough to call this whole thing out.