Wesley So continues to lead the Masters group at the Tata Steel chess tournament with 5 points, but that is only good for a half-point edge over the troika of Magnus Carlsen, Pavel Eljanov, and Wei Yi.
In round 7 So had White against Eljanov, and although he had a slight edge in the opening Eljanov outplayed him in the second half of the game, though not quite enough to muster serious winning chances.
Carlsen really should have caught him, but he faltered badly against Anish Giri. Carlsen played a great first half of the game, and had mate in three (more or less; Black could avoided the mate by accepting catastrophic material losses). With plenty of time on the clock Carlsen missed this and went for another, significantly less convincing winning line, and botched that one too. Giri hung on like grim death and got the draw after 123 moves.
As for Wei Yi, he joined the tie for second by beating Loek van Wely. Van Wely was badly prepared and was lost after just 14 moves, and although Wei Yi made life a bit more difficult for himself than he needed to he was still in control all the way.
The day's other winners were Sergey Karjakin and Baskaran Adhiban. Karjakin beat Levon Aronian in what a very nice, clean positional game, marred only by his missing a chance to win the game on move 11. As for Adhiban's win, it was a messy see-saw struggle with Radoslaw Wojtaszek that won't make either player's best games collection.
As usual, I've annotated all the decisive games, and as a bonus I've included Carlsen-Giri as well, here. Here are the round 8 pairings:
In the Challengers group almost all the leaders won their games, so the top standings look like this:
Potentially major games in round 8 include Smirin-Ragger and Lu Shanglei-Xiong.