Round 7 of the Tata Steel tournament in Wijk aan Zee was the bloodiest yet, with four decisive games out of seven. Better still, all three of the pre-round leaders were involved in decisive games, with one of them beating another.
If Magnus Carlsen goes on to win this tournament, the other players can blame it all on Loek van Wely - both because of the "free" point and especially because of the resulting boost in the world champion's confidence. Today Carlsen won his third game in a row, this time defeating Pavel Eljanov with Black in an entertaining game. Chess fans might think that because the signature Carlsen victory involves grinding an opponent down positionally that he is less capable of winning in a tactical melee. Today's game puts paid to that hypothesis. Eljanov went on a tactical adventure with the move 15.e4, but Carlsen saw through it all and by the time the position had resolved itself around move 22, it was evident that Black had a serious edge. A second flurry went even worse for White, and Eljanov had to resign after just 34 moves.
Meanwhile, Fabiano Caruana kept pace with Carlsen by defeating Ding Liren, who had also led with a +2 score entering the round. This victory took considerably longer than Carlsen's - it went 83 moves - but Caruana enjoyed a serious edge from early on and could enjoy the game from start to finish.
In the battle of the Dutchmen, Anish Giri easily handled his older opponent, Loek van Wely, and won with the black pieces to get to a +1 score. Meanwhile, the other decisive game saw Hou Yifan, who had been on a very impressive +1 score, suffer her first defeat of the tournament when she lost to Shakhriyar Mamedyarov. She was somewhat worse most of the time, but shortly before the time control she had fought back and was within range of a draw. It's complicated, but it seems that 37...Be8 would have allowed her to safely regain the a-pawn, with equality. Instead, she took it immediately (37...Nxa4), but this was a tactical error that Mamedyarov exploited. Hou put up a good fight, but her kingside weaknesses proved fatal in the ensuing ending.
The remaining games were drawn, with only David Navara vs. Sergey Karjakin having even a whiff of a winning possibility for one side or the other (in this case Karjakin). Wei Yi had to suffer a while against Wesley So, though without ever being in real danger, and Evgeny Tomashevsky vs. Michael Adams was a short and comfortable draw for both players.
The round 8 pairings are as follows:
In the Challengers, three results are especially noteworthy. First and foremost, Baskaran Adhiban crushed Alexey Dreev to break their tie for first. Adhiban has 6/7, Dreev 5, and in between is Eltaj Safarli, who defeated Mikhail Antipov to reach 5.5 points. The third result was Anne Haast's very impressive victory over Liviu-Dieter Nisipeanu, made all the more impressive by the 300 point rating gap in the latter's favor, by the fact that she had black, and especially given that her total after six rounds was the same as it was before the tournament started. Kudos to her for staying tough and beating a very strong opponent!