No draw death here! Four of the six first-round games in the new Grand Chess Tour event in Zagreb, Croatia, had a winner. And these were not rapid or blitz games; they were classical contests.
Magnus Carlsen led the way, as one would expect from the world champion, speedily defeating Anish Giri. Giri was too taken on the champion's poor queenside structure and neglected his king's safety. He paid the price, and he paid it quickly.
Fabiano Caruana defeated Hikaru Nakamura thanks to good preparation on his part combined, I suspect, with Nakamura's forgetting his own prep. The players raced through their first 23 and a half moves, and then Nakamura made back to back errors. Caruana played just about perfectly and won convincingly.
Wesley So was a little better against Ding Liren thanks to a slightly better structure and his bishop pair (though the dark squared bishop was relative ineffectual), but Ding's problems only became serious - fatal, even - when his remaining bishop got stranded and then lost.
Viswanathan Anand and Ian Nepomniachtchi had an up-and-down battle. Anand's 12.f3 was perhaps mistaken, but Nepo's reply was even worse. Anand enjoyed a serious advantage, but it quickly slipped away. Anand continued to drift, wound up in a bad queenless middlegame, and then blundered with 30.Be2 (he should have avoided the ensuing pin by taking on f5) and then again with 32.Rg2. It was a very bad day for the former champion.
The other two games were tasty draws. Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and Levon Aronian played an interesting Berlin ending that wasn't just rattling off computer prep, while Shakhriyar Mamedyarov and Sergey Karjakin tested a lively line of the 4.f3 Nimzo-Indian that finished in a repetition.
The games are here (I've annotated Carlsen's and Caruana's wins), and here are the round 2 pairings: