Norway Chess, Round 3: Carlsen Leads
It was an excellent round for the champ, as Magnus Carlsen defeated Alexander Grischuk in their classical game with a direct kingside attack to get the full two points for the round, while Shakhriyar Mamedyarov - the previous leader - lost his classical game to Levon Aronian, despite having the white pieces. Still more good news for the champ: Yu Yangyi entered the round tied with Carlsen, but lost his classical game against Wesley So. Fabiano Caruana also suffered a loss, to Ding Liren, so in every match involving players with reasonable scores (excepting Carlsen's), the player with the lower score won. Finally, Viswanathan Anand drew twice with Maxime Vachier-Lagrave in the battle of players entering the round with half a point out of four. As Anand had Black in both games, he "won" the Armageddon battle and took that match by a 1.5-0.5 score.
Tomorrow/today (Friday) is a rest day, so there's a chance I'll get caught up on the games. For now, here are the pairings for round 4, on Saturday:
Reader Comments (1)
After 4 rounds there have been 7 decisive classical games - Grenke had 10 at the same point. Armageddon games don't appear to have any impact on draws. (Isn't that what they are supposed to do?). Vishy seemed dismissive of the Armageddon games even after a very exciting win against Ding. Maybe the prize money could be decided on the Classical score and the Armageddon results could be used in the case of a tie? and an Armageddon Armageddon play off if there are still ties. Armageddon outta here!
[DM: Ba dum tsh! It has gotten worse since you wrote the comment: now it's 7 decisive (classical) games after 6 rounds - 7 out of 30! It's only one tournament, but it hasn't been a good advertisement for the format, except to the degree that Norway wants to do what they can to improve Carlsen's chance of winning.]