The pre-World Championship match festivities are winding down; the match between Peter Svidler and Sam Shankland is over, while there's just one round left to play at the Isle of Man. (But don't fret: there's the Shenzhen Masters starting November 4 with Ding Liren, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Anish Giri, Yu Yangyi, Radoslaw Wojtaszek, and Nikita Vitiugov. There's no getting away from big chess anymore.)
Starting with what has finished: Svidler had some advantage with White, but not enough to cash in with a win (and probably not a lot of motivation to do so, either). Shankland drew, so Svidler won the match 3.5-2.5. This was pretty close to what one would expect from their ratings, with Svidler gaining two points from the match. The undercard maintained its "perfection", as Vladimir Fedoseev and Jorden Van Foreest drew all six of their games, and thus the match.
The Isle of Man International finishes tomorrow (Sunday), and the trends were reversed in today's penultimate round. The number of leaders had been increasing every round; now it has shrunk to two. The nine super-GMs had been performing well, with at least eight of the nine enjoying great chances to win the tournament. Now only one of the big nine is within half a point of the lead, and he's not one of the two leaders. Here's the run-down:
Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and Wang Hao were among the co-leaders, but after their (clean) draw they're half a point back. The next two games involving co-leaders were decisive, however. Arkadij Naiditsch defeated Hikaru Nakamura, first obtaining a positional advantage and then surviving the up-and-down tactical play that resulted from Nakamura's objectively dubious piece sac on move 26. Naiditsch was short of time though and it wasn't a bad practical chance. Nakamura managed to equalize, but then was worse before having one brief chance to be better with 35...Nf4. After 35...Re5? White was (again) winning, and didn't give Black any more opportunities.
Radoslaw Wojtaszek was the other winner, defeating Michael Adams thanks mostly to Adams' blunder on move 15. It cost him the exchange, and Wojtaszek duly converted his advantage.
Jeffery Xiong was the last co-leader, but in his long game with Vladimir Kramnik he was always playing defense. He was in trouble shortly after the first time control, but when Kramnik played 46.Bxf2 instead of 46.Kg1 Xiong was able to escape.
All the games featuring players half a point out of first finished in a draw except for Gawain Jones vs. Levon Aronian. Jones won pretty convincingly, as if he was the former world's #2 rather than a consistent mid-to-upper 2600-level player. Congrats to Jones!
Here are the leading pairings for the final round:
The next eight boards are all 5.5 vs. 5.5 pairings, but they are of course outside of the race for first.