It was another interesting day with shaky play and surprising results. Fabiano Caruana was probably losing both of his first two games with Ian Nepomniachtchi, but drew both of them. He drew the third game as well, and then won the fourth game from what was at one moment a dodgy position. Meanwhile, Anish Giri lost the first two games to Maxime Vachier-Lagrave - the first one for no sensible reason at all - and the Frenchmen drew the last two games to coast in with a 3-1 victory.
I don't know if total points play a role in a possible tiebreak, but they are otherwise irrelevant to the scoring. Whether a player wins the match 4-0 or 2.5-1.5 - provided he wins without an Armageddon game - he wins the match 3-0. If he needs to win the Armageddon game, then he gets 2 points for the match and his opponent gets a single point. Therefore, after one round Caruana and MVL join Ding Liren (who defeated Alireza Firouzja 2.5-1.5 in their match on Saturday) in the early lead with three points apiece, a point ahead of Magnus Carlsen who needed the extra game to dispatch Hikaru Nakamura. In their regular games, White won every time, with Carlsen grinding out endgame victories in the first and third games while Nakamura won with a direct attack in game 2 and by taking advantage of a couple of blunders in game 4. In the Armageddon game, Nakamura had White, but the streak was broken. He overextended in his attempt to attack, and then a blunder in a bad position sealed his fate.
Here are the pairings for round two, with the first two pairings occurring tomorrow and the next two on Tuesday:
Carlsen-Firouzja ought to be a lot of fun, as the World Champion seeks revenge for the damage the youngster has been doing to him at faster time controls. Nepo vs. MVL is also interesting, as the Candidates co-leaders square off. Will Nepo achieve a (very, very) small measure of revenge for his defeat in the final round of the first cycle of that event?
Play begins at 10 a.m. ET each day, and can be viewed live on Chess24 and Twitch; probably elsewhere, too. For the games, I'll send you to TWIC's page for the event.