A little update from around the chess world.
First, Abhimanyu Mishra will be a GM soon, but not by the end of the norm event he's playing in now. He (probably) needed 7/9; 2/5 clearly isn't going to cut it. Hopefully he can minimize the rating damage he has suffered thus far. (Unless you're a Sergey Karjakin superfan, in which case you hope the damage piles up like an avalanche.)
Second: the "Mr Dodgy Invitational 2.0" (afaik, "Mr. Dodgy" is the username of a Chess24 superfan; I don't know if he contributed any money to the event's prize fund) was won by Anish Giri, who also won the inaugural event last year. It was only blitz, but a strong 16-player knockout event featuring mostly 2700s, near-2700s, and ex-2700s.
Third: Yu Yangyi won the Chinese Championships on tiebreak ahead of Wei Yi and Li Di. He clinched the title with a round to go, and then promptly lost in the last round, as often happens (and seems to be happening with increased regularity).
Fourth: The next big online event starts on Sunday - the FTX Crypto Cup as part of the Meltwater Champions Chess Tour. As the name hints, the prize fund will be in Bitcoin; whether that's good or bad is beyond me, but aside from Alan Pichot everyone else in the lineup will be fine, based on their chess earnings and their earning power, even if Bitcoin goes the way of Enron and Bernie Madoff. Here's the rest of the field:
Magnus Carlsen, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Ding Liren, Hikaru Nakamura, Alexander Grischuk, Ian Nepomniachtchi, Levon Aronian, Fabiano Caruana, Daniil Dubov, Shakhriyar Mamedyarov, Teimour Radjabov, Peter Svidler, Wesley So, Anish Giri, and Alireza Firouzja.
The event runs from the 23rd to the 31st of this month, and follows the usual formate: three days of preliminaries reducing the field to eight players (from 16) who will play a series of knockout matches. There will be two days of quarterfinals, two days of semis, and a two-day final. Each round's k.o. matches consists of a pair of best-of-four mini-matches, one mini-match per day. The mini-matches don't have tiebreaks, and are scored overall as if they were a single game. (Thus if player 1 wins the first day 3-0 and loses 2.5-1.5 on the second day, the overall score is 1-1.) If it's 1-1 after the mini-matches, the players have a two-game blitz playoff, followed by an Armageddon game if necessary.