This has really been an exciting and entertaining tournament so far, with some big upsets and great stories. We've already looked at some round 1 highlights, and we'll skip over round 2 to turn our attention to round 3.
The first and biggest story: Vladimir Kramnik lost again, to James Tarjan! Tarjan is a grandmaster and was a fine player in his day - more than 30 years ago! He gave up the game in his early 30s and became a librarian, only re-emerging in the last three years or so. His results have been very good for a 65-year-old who quit playing for 30 years, but not up to his old standard. But today the American GM notched the biggest scalp of his career, upsetting a player rated nearly 400 points above him.
When I was a kid I lost to Tarjan in an open tournament here in the U.S., and was he incredibly gracious to nobody me in the post-mortem. He was one of the nicest guys I came across, so I'm especially happy for him after his success today. Indeed, watch this video - you have to have a heart of stone not to be happy for the guy.
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This is good news for the U.S. in another way: Kramnik is now in a big hole in the race for the Candidates spots based on ratings. Unless something dramatic happens - and it might - those spots will go to Fabiano Caruana and Wesley So. More good news for the U.S.: Aleks Lenderman is 3-0, having defeated Francisco Vallejo Pons today when the latter failed to hold the notorious rook vs. rook and bishop ending.
But back to feel-good stories of the Tarjan variety. You may recall that 70-year-old FM Zaki Harari had near-2700 GM Maxim Rodshtein beat in that round, but repeated moves rather than landing the knockout blow. Well, no problem: today he had another chance against a GM, Ketevan Arakhamia-Grant, and this time he won. Granted, she's not at Rodshtein's level, but it was still a major upset. Good for Mr. Harari!
A sadder story, of sorts, is the unbelievable saga of Hou Yifan. You might recall at the start of the year she was extremely irritated at getting paired with seven female players in the first nine rounds, and she protested in round 10 by playing an absurd opening (against her male opponent) and resigning after five moves. There was no evidence that anyone had cooked the pairings to give her a disproportionate number of female opponents, but she wasn't so sure, and was certainly unhappy about it.
Here we are, months later in a different location. Who do you suppose she has faced this time? Round 1: Alexandra Kosteniuk (draw). Round 2: Elisabeth Paehtz (win). Uh oh. Round 3: Nino Batsiashvili (loss). UH OH. If she doesn't withdraw or hire protestors to block access to the tournament hall, the absurdist drama will continue in round 4, when she's due to face Yuliya Shvayger. You've gotta be kidding. It's pretty incredible that between the two events she's facing 11 women in 14 rounds, even though they are heavily outnumbered by the male players in the tournament.
At the top, Magnus Carlsen leads the small group of players with 3-0 scores; today he defeated American youngster Jeffery Xiong, though the win wasn't quite as convincing as it might have seemed. In round 4 he'll have Black against Rustam Kasimdzhanov, a former FIDE World Champion and Fabiano Caruana's second. The other 3-0 pairing is a World Cup rematch, with Lenderman getting White against Pavel Eljanov, who happens to be the defending champion of this tournament. 19 players have 2.5 points, including Caruana, Hikaru Nakamura, and Viswanathan Anand.
Some games here, with brief comments.