A busy day, so I'm afraid that this entry will be limited to results. (It may or may not be supplemented in a day or two.) It was a day where the rich got richer and the poor stayed poor. Magnus Carlsen started out in serious trouble on the black side of a Classical Sicilian (the Rauzer Variation) against Aryan Tari, but at some point Tari lost the thread and fell victim to a vicious queenside counterattack. Levon Aronian also had the black pieces, also against a player yet to get on the scoreboard - in this case Jan-Krzysztof Duda - and he also won. He wasn't in trouble, unlike Carlsen, but it also seemed that the game was petering out to a routine draw in a rook ending. Apparently it wasn't routine enough for Duda, and Aronian scraped out a win.
That win put him into a tie for first with Fabiano Caruana, a point ahead of Carlsen, thanks to Alireza Firouzja's "match" win over Caruana. Firouzja had White in their games. Their classical game was fairly short, and it was Caruana who was doing the pressing. Then it was time for blitz, and this just isn't Caruana's forte, especially relative to Firouzja. The game wasn't a rout by any means, but as time ran low Caruana couldn't maintain as high a level of play as his opponent, and Firouzja won the game and closed to within a point and a half of the leaders.
Here are the round 4 pairings:
This is obviously going to be a big round for the standings, and at least one of the tailenders (and possibly both) will finally eliminate the unsightly goose egg from the scoretable.