FIDE Grand Swiss, Round 5: Firouzja, Najer, and Shirov Lead with 4 Points Apiece
As usual, there have been lots of draws on the top boards of the FIDE Grand Swiss, so a huge number of players are within striking distance of the lead. Alireza Firouzja continues to lead after his draw, but he has been caught by Evgeniy Najer and - a blast from the past - Alexei Shirov. They each have four points, good for a half point lead over 14 other players, including Fabiano Caruana, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Yu Yangyi, and youngsters Samuel Sevian and Nihal Sarin. All the aforementioned players feature in the pairings for the top 5 boards of round 6: Shirov-Firouzja, Najer-Caruana, MVL-Ponkratov, Sevian-Yu, and Sarin-Navara.
Six rounds remain to determine two more slots for the 2022 Candidates. For now, here are three games from round 5, with my comments.
Reader Comments (1)
Tari--Fedoseev from rd. 3 was something out of another century.
[DM: That was a nice adventure, though games like that happen more often nowadays than one might suppose. (But proportionally, it was definitely more likely to arise in an earlier era.) Here's a link to the game: https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=2095336]