Just a quick update on yesterday's action at the two super-events, the London Grand Prix and the Sao Paulo/Bilbao Final Masters. In London, all the games were drawn, so Gelfand maintains his half point lead over his closest competitors, Grischuk and Leko. As sometimes happens before a rest day, the players seemed ready for a full two-day weekend and played low energy chess, with the usual notable exceptions of Nakamura and Topalov. Their reward was to get into a little trouble, but I don't think either player was ever lost. After today's rest day, they'll resume tomorrow (Thursday) with the following pairings (player scores in parenthesis):
In Sao Paulo, two of the three games were again decisive. Caruana made it back to back victories, convincingly defeating Karjakin with Black in a Neo-Archangelsk Ruy Lopez. Anand had absolutely nothing with White against Aronian's Berlin defense, so the result was a quick draw (considering Anand's disastrous record against Aronian the past few years, maybe he felt "better safe than sorry" was the way to go). Finally, Carlsen bounced back from his loss in round 1, working his famous endgame magic against Vallejo. I'm not sure the game could have been saved in any case, but Vallejo's decision to swap rooks with 31.Rc1 looks like it loses by force.
After two rounds, Caruana leads with 2 points, Aronian has 1.5, Anand and Carlsen have 1, Vallejo has half a point and Karjakin has a goose egg for his troubles. Here are the pairings for round 3, which started about an hour ago: Carlsen - Karjakin (castling queenside, anyone?), Caruana - Anand, and Aronian - Vallejo.