Just to recap: at the end of day 1, Viswanathan Anand was alone in first with 7/10 (3.5/5 on normal scoring, but with everything doubled so that individual rapid games count twice as much as the individual blitz games to be played on Sunday and Monday), a point ahead of Fabiano Caruana and Wesley So. Magnus Carlsen was tied for next to last with 4 points after losing a winning position to Caruana in round 4 and blundering a piece in the opening against Hikaru Nakamura in round 5.
In round 6, Anand extended his lead over the field with a quick win over Anish Giri. With White in an Anti-Berlin Anand took the better structure while Giri banked on dynamic play, and when Giri played 17...Re8(?) rather than 17...Nh5 the structural considerations took precedence. Soon White was a pawn up for nothing, and the game ended shortly thereafter. Neither So nor Caruana gained any ground: Nakamura played solidly against the former to draw, while Maxime Vachier-Lagrave made Caruana sweat before the latter achieved a draw. Levon Aronian-Vladimir Kramnik was also a stable draw, but the remaining game had a winner: Carlsen defeated Veselin Topalov in an endgame grind to get back to 50%.
Leader: Anand 9/12, two points ahead of his closest pursuers.
In round 7 there were four decisive games, and the leader was on the wrong side of one of them. Kramnik obtained only the smallest of edges against Anand, but ground away, won a pawn, and made the rook ending tricky enough that even a great defender like Anand was unable to hold. This enabled So to catch up with an impressive win over Topalov. So played a provocative opening with Black, inviting Topalov to grab a ton of extra space. Topalov took it, but when his center blew up so did everything else. So sacced a couple of pawns to get at White's king, and Topalov gave up after just 28 moves. If Caruana had won, he would have joined the tie for first, and for a long time he had good chances to defeat Aronian. In the end, he overpressed and then blundered, and with the win Aronian closed to within a point (half a point on traditional scoring) of the leaders. The fourth victory belonged to the surging Carlsen, who defeated his erstwhile nemesis Giri with no trouble at all. Giri's e-pawn proved weak in an Advance Caro-Kann, and it soon dropped off the board. Giri could have struggled on, but decided to call it a day after 23 moves. Finally, MVL could have made it five decisive games out of five, but after his 26...Rfc8? instead of 26...Rd8 Nakamura escaped with a draw.
Leaders: Anand, So 9/14; Aronian, Carlsen 8
The penultimate round saw more shuffling at the top, headlined by the Carlsen-Anand pairing. Anand had seemed to equalize on the black side of an Anti-Berlin, and although he may have done so in the eyes of the computer there were still problems to solve. Carlsen constructed an ingenious bind, and after 37.b3 Anand was in an absolute zugzwang. He resigned a move later. So would have been in clear first with a win, but he allowed Giri to show some nice preparation in the Semi-Slav reminiscent of some work done by Rustam Kasimdzhanov and Anand from several years ago. The game ended in a draw that's probably on every elite GM's computer if they play the Semi-Slav with Black. So and Carlsen were thus tied for first, and Aronian made it a three-way tie after defeating Nakamura. The American apparently mixed up his Ragozin lines, and Aronian won a pretty easily. In the other games, Caruana won comfortably against Kramnik (and finished with a simple but nice tactic), and Vachier-Lagrave barely avoided (what would have been an unnecessary) defeat against Topalov thanks to a study-like draw after Topalov's 48...h5?
Leaders: Aronian, Carlsen, So 10/16; Anand, Caruana 9
The first game to finish in the final round was Anand-So. In yet another Anti-Berlin, So found a clever way to force a repetition, and the game ended in just 17 moves. Anand was thus eliminated from first-place contention in the Rapid, while So - who went undefeated! - was the clubhouse leader. The second leader, Aronian, didn't even manage a draw. Topalov played a very good game against him with White, winning convincingly. That left the way clear for Carlsen, and he outplayed Kramnik with Black to win, going 4/4 (8/8) on the day. Very impressive. It is possible that Kramnik had a fortress in the end - not the fortress he thought he had when he played 47.Nxd5, but with 47.Ne4 followed by g5 and bringing the king up it looks like a draw. Kramnik didn't go for that, and declined an opportunity for a repetition earlier in the event, and Carlsen took advantage. In the one game where neither player had a shot at first, Giri tortured MVL for a very long time in a rook ending, and after a long and stout defense Vachier-Lagrave made the inevitable fatal error and lost. Finally: at the start of the round Caruana could hope to sneak into a tie for first (if all the other results went his way) and played very enterprisingly against Nakamura, sacrificing two exchanges for a couple of pawns. It was a nice idea, but Nakamura kept things under control and was never worse, and eventually (117 moves!) he managed to garner the full point.
Final Rapid Standings:
- 1. Carlsen 12 (of 18)
- 2. So 11
- 3-4. Aronian, Anand 10
- 5. Caruana 9
- 6-8. Topalov, Giri, Vachier-Lagrave 8
- 9-10. Kramnik, Nakamura 7