Following up on the discussion in the previous post on this event, in which I protest slightly against Leo Tolstoy's logorrhea in War and Peace, it seems mildly ironic that a chess tournament named for him, the Tolstoy Cup, is a rapid one. Shouldn't each game be played with, say, a 10-hour time control instead?
But I digress. At the end of the first day of action, with Anish Giri enjoying a 5-0 score while his not-too-close closest pursuers - all six(!) of them - had only 2.5 points, a couple of entertaining scenarios seemed possible. One, mentioned in that previous post, was for Giri to sweep the field and go 9-0, a la Bobby Fischer in the 1963/4 U.S. Championship. The other was perhaps my all-time favorite professional tournament result (from a numbers point of view), the 2001 Linares tournament won by Garry Kasparov with a +5 score; literally everyone else finished in a tie for second-through-last place with -1 scores.
Alas, neither scenario occurred. Giri was held to a draw by Dmitry Andreikin in round 6, and after a couple more wins, drew with Anton Korobov in the last round. Still, his 8/9 score maintained his 2.5 point lead, but only one player - Nodirbek Abdusattorov managed to stay even that close. Boris Gelfand finished a further half a point behind, and then everyone else finished with an even or a minus score.
As the tournament winner, Giri's games are almost certainly those most worth going over. Nevertheless, here are two games from today's round 6 that caught my eye - enjoy.