It wasn't all that long ago that winning streaks were matters of historical interest when considering the super-grandmaster level; suddenly they are in danger of becoming commonplace. Fabiano Caruana's 7-0 start to the Sinquefield earned him deserved notoriety, and now Alexander Grischuk is following in his footsteps. With another impressive (though imperfect) win, this time over Alexander Morozevich, Grischuk leads the Tigran Petrosian Memorial by a full point with a 3-0 score. (Pointless link here.) Moreover, this is his sixth consecutive win in conjunction with his previous event; the Baku Grand Prix several weeks ago, which he concluded with wins over Caruana(!), Rustam Kasimdzhanov and Leinier Dominguez Perez. (I've uploaded the games of his streak here.)
His rating is now 2807, and while he's still some distance behind Magnus Carlsen his recent surge, along with that of Caruana, Veselin Topalov (back to 2800) and Viswanathan Anand as well suggests that the peleton may be starting to close on Carlsen. I think this is good for chess whether they reel Carlsen in or not: if they do, it's good to have drama at the top; if they don't, it will hopefully be because Carlsen has pushed his game to a whole new level.
Back to this tournament. The other three games were drawn. Levon Aronian made Ding Liren sweat it out for a long time in the Symmetrical Gruenfeld, while Vladimir Kramnik had good chances against Peter Leko, but good defense held out in both cases. The last game, between Ernesto Inarkiev and Boris Gelfand, was also a Symmetrical Gruenfeld, but it never got too far out of balance before the players split the point.
Friday is a rest day, and play will resume on Saturday (when no one will be watching) with these pairings: