After a slow start, play has heated up the past two rounds of the Tata Steel Chess Tournament in Wijk aan Zee. In both rounds 4 and 5 of the A-group, five of the seven games finished with a victor.
Alas, though, all the leaders drew: Viswanathan Anand and Magnus Carlsen with each other in a dull Petroff, and Sergey Karjakin with Anish Giri in a Gruenfeld (of course).
No one managed to catch up to the three leaders, but four of the day's five winners are now just half a point behind. Two of the winners, Hikaru Nakamura and Levon Aronian, managed to win when their opponents (Hou Yifan and Ivan Sokolov, respectively) blew themselves up trying to make something happen in complicated but worse positions. Pentala Harikrishna and Wang Hao won attractive games with spectacular finishes. Finally, Peter Leko won a positional gem, outplaying Fabiano Caruana on the white side of the latter's beloved Ruy Lopez.
It has been a long and busy day, so no annotated games today, but those of you who haven't yet replayed the games can do so here. Meanwhile, here are the pairings for round 6, starting a few hours hence (player scores are given in parentheses):