With these two wins, the eighth-finals of the 2020 Speed Chess Championship (Main Event) is over, and the quarterfinal pairings are up, starting with a match on Thursday (tomorrow) between Wesley So and Jan-Krzysztof Duda. (The other three quarterfinals are Nakamura-Fedoseev, scheduled for December 3; Carlsen vs. Artemiev [date and time TBD] and Vachier-Lagrave vs. Aronian [also TBD].)
But now let's go back. I thought that Duda would be a favorite against Fabiano Caruana, as Duda is a consistently strong blitz and bullet player while Caruana only very occasionally plays like a world championship contender at the fastest time controls. His best in blitz may be better than Duda's, but he doesn't often achieve his best, and I'm not sure about his bullet prowess, either. As things turned out, Caruana started well, racing off to a 4-1 advantage, but after getting crushed in game 6 he lost three more in a row to finish the 5-minute portion down by a game. They broke even in the 3-minute, keeping Duda up by a point entering the bullet, and then Caruana got massacred 8-1 at that time control, losing the match 17-9. After the match Caruana acknowledged his concerns beforehand that bullet might be a problem, noting that this was not something he could easily fix with a bullet warmup. Given his self-acknoweldged lack of interest in bullet, he's unlikely to be a serious contender in future editions of this event, at least not unless he's playing his best blitz and acquiring a serious lead heading into the bullet.
The other match, between Vladislav Artemiev and Anish Giri was more competitive. As in the previous match, the eventual match winner - Artemiev - entered the bullet with only a one-point lead. It wasn't as one-sided as Duda-Caruana, but Artemiev had an extra gear in bullet that his opponent didn't, or at least didn't on the day. Artemiev outscored his opponent 6.5-3.5 in the final segment, taking overall match victory by a 15.5-11.5 score.
I've annotated a pair of especially interesting games, one game from each match, here.