After the first cycle in Sao Paulo, Magnus Carlsen looked like an also-ran - lucky to be in clear third place, "only" five points behind the leader, Fabiano Caruana. Two rounds into the second cycle, in Bilbao, he and Caruana are tied for first, and he's not far from catching Garry Kasparov's all-time rating record. (Prescinding from any possible rating inflation, anyway.)
All the non-Carlsen games in the second cycle of the "Final Masters" have been drawn (just three more Viswanathan Anand will keep his title!), but the Norwegian terror is again working his magic. In round 6 he had the white pieces against Caruana, and this was pretty close to a must-win game for him. He rose to the occasion, and in his usual style: a semi-theoretical opening (the King's Indian Attack vs. the French, in this case), using the middlegame to induce some enemy weaknesses, which leads to persistent pressure in the ending followed by the opponent eventually cracking. Check, check and check. Caruana maintained material equality for a long time, but the bishop ending they finally reached was hopeless. Curiously, it was a sort of mirror image of Fischer-Keres from Zurich 1959. There the players had light squared bishops, and Fischer had the only two pawns, on the f- and h-file. In Carlsen-Caruana, they ultimately reached an ending with dark squared bishops and white c- and a-pawns! In both cases the only real task was to prevent the defender from sacrificing his bishop for the bishop-pawn (the f-pawn in Fischer-Keres; the c-pawn in Carlsen-Caruana), and the winners coped in both games.
Then today, Carlsen had White again; this time against rating tail-ender Francisco Vallejo Pons. Once again Carlsen left the beaten tracks of opening theory most expeditiously, meeting today's French Defense with 4.exd5 against the Winawer. That isn't a completely theory-free zone, but Carlsen avoided most of that theory as well. The difference between this game and yesterday's is that Vallejo didn't make it to an endgame. Carlsen maintained pressure against Black's kingside, and eventually broke through and won.
Here are the pairings for round 8, with scores (remember, 3-1-0 scoring) in parenthesis. There are three rounds to go:
Karjakin (5) - Carlsen (12)
Anand (7) - Caruana (12)
Vallejo (4) - Aronian (9)