Some more thoughts on the super-strong Tal Memorial, whose last three rounds will take place Friday-Sunday:
* Magnus Carlsen is having a good tournament but not a great one. Nevertheless, he did enjoy a very important victory when he crushed Viswanathan Anand in round 5. He achieved some advantage in the opening with White in a Nimzo-Indian, and that advantage grew quickly and massively after his 19.f3 aned 20.e4. Anand didn't manage to find a good response to the plan, and resigned just nine moves later. Perhaps the culprit was that he missed 25.Bh3; indeed, without that White has no advantage at all. (With it, he's practically winning.)
That was the highlight of his tournament so far; the lowlight came in round 3 when he lost a peculiar game to Fabiano Caruana. First he blundered a pawn just after the opening, missing a short and simple tactic. Trading judiciously, he reached a rook ending where he was still a pawn down but holding the draw should have been routine. Instead, he botched it, twice rejecting Rb8. The first time, on move 49, it would have resulted in an easy hold; the second time, in a more challenging one. This was Carlsen's second recent loss in the sort of technical position where he excels (the other was to Wang Hao in the Norway super-tournament), leading one wag to suggest that Carlsen was hiding his endgame preparation for Anand.
* Speaking of the champion, he is tied for last place with his "great predecessor" Vladimir Kramnik and with the often erratic Alexander Morozevich. About Kramnik: he lost his first two games (a continuing hangover from London?) - first to Carlsen in a very good fight, but then to Hikaru Nakamura in most uncharacteristic fashion. Kramnik was essentially up a pawn for nothing, and yet somehow the wheels came off and he lost two pawns and then the game. Since then he has drawn his last four games, and two of them - the ones with Shakhriyar Mamedyarov in round 3 and with Caruana in round 6 - were remarkable. In both games he had the black pieces, in both games his opponent played the first new move, and in both games his theoretical preparation extended to the end of the game. The game with Caruana is especially impressive, and I cover it here.
* Caruana is only at 50%, but that's enough for him to have moved into third place on the live rating list, a hair ahead of Kramnik. Send him back!!
* Boris Gelfand is also doing well on the rating list and in the tournament. His rating is at an all-time peak, and he is undefeated in the event with wins over Morozevich and Caruana, good enough for clear second place. How much does this guy have to do to get some love from chess fans who aren't middle-aged or from Israel or the former USSR? In the last several years he won the World Cup, the Candidates, basically drew a match for the world championship, tied for first in a FIDE Grand Prix event and in the Alekhine Memorial, and now he's in second place in a colossally strong round-robin. The man is not some sort of journeyman 2700; he is a legitimately great player!
* Finally, we must mention the tournament leader, Hikaru Nakamura. He won the blitz event convincingly, but a game and a half into the real event it looked like a disaster. He was crushed by Mamedyarov and was apparently on his way to a loss against Kramnik. A strange sequence by Kramnik later, and everything turned around: he won that game, then beat Sergey Karjakin and Fabiano Caruana in a pair of good games. Following a draw with Dmitry Andreikin (who has acquitted himself very well so far; despite being the lowest-rated player he has drawn all his games) he added Anand's scalp to the collection. This has him at #5 in the live ratings, and - if he can hold it - he will at last pass Bobby Fischer's rating record for an American: Fischer's peak was 2785, while Nakamura is at 2789. (I think most people would allow that there has been at least five rating points' worth of inflation, but it's a significant accomplishment all the same.) Getting to 2800 by tournament's end is unlikely (though not impossible!), but making it to #4 or even #3 on the rating list is very much a possibility.