Fabiano Caruana wins a game and leads the tournament. Where have we heard that line before? A few more months of this and people will start offering retrospectives on the Magnus Carlsen era. Today it was Peter Svidler who was tossed into the wood chipper, though the game wasn't as clean as one might have liked. Caruana came out of the opening, a 3.f3 Anti-Gruenfeld, with a significant advantage, but 18.e5 was a mistake. (A very natural move, but a mistake nevertheless; 18.Nge2 was probably best.) The struggle flared up anew until Svidler's 27...Rh8?; the computer suggests (the very risky-looking) 27...Bxe4 28.Nxe4 f5 instead. For rating watchers, Caruana is now over 2851 and a win or two away from beating Garry Kasparov's career best (live) Elo rating. Carlsen himself is just 12 points away, though the latter's all-time mark will be safe at least through the end of this tournament.
Boris Gelfand could have kept pace with a win over Sergey Karjakin, but while the game was a success - an easy draw with Black in a Najdorf where he even enjoyed some advantage - he is out of first place for the first time in the tournament.
Rustam Kasimdzhanov won pretty easily against Dmitry Andreikin, who once again appeared not to "have any openings". Kasimdzhanov had a large advantage after the opening and rolled to victory.
Alexander Grischuk's woes in this tournament continued with a strange loss to Teimour Radjabov. He came out of the opening with a slight edge with White into a middlegame with a large margin of safety. This margin disappeared with the combination of 19.b4 and 25.f4 (the latter move in particular was an error), creating targets for Radjabov on both sides of the board. 29.Qxe8 was the decisive error, after which Radjabov was able to take aim at the weaknesses and stroll to success.
Leinier Dominguez had some advantage against Shakhriyar Mamedyarov, but was unable to bring home the full point.
Likewise, Evgeny Tomashevsky had an edge (though generally not a very big one) against Hikaru Nakamura throughout their game, which was drawn as well.
Round 7 Pairings: