The Week in Chess

Fabiano Caruana beat Maxime Vachier-Lagrave 2.5-1.5 to secure his place in the Final Four of the Magnus Carlsen Invitational after the sixth of seven preliminary rounds. He joins Magnus Carlsen, Hikaru Nakamura and Ding Liren who had already made it. Day 13 of the preliminary competition will sort out the placings that determine the pairings in the Final Four (1 vs 4 and 2 vs 3) and the precise prize money for the bottom four. In the other match Nakamura beat Ding 3-2 after a tie-break.

Caruana's 2.5-1.5 win against MVL came as a result of winning both his games with the white pieces. In game one MVL came quite close to equality on a number of occasions but after 40...Bd8?! (40...Qb4=) he had trouble defending his King against the combined force of Queen and Knight had to resign on move 47. In game 3 MVL had to go all out for a win to keep himself alive in the tournament and his Leningrad Dutch should have got him that victory after 28.h3 MVL needed to sacrifice something (28...Ngxf2 or 28...Nxg3) instead he retreated the attacked knight and just a few moves later was worse and was ground down in 103 moves. Caruana had the better of the draw in game two, in the final game where the result didn't matter for the match result MVL did finally win a game.

Hikaru Nakamura eventually prevailed in a very interesting match against Ding Liren by winning the Armageddon game, the four rapid games were drawn. In game one Nakamura had a very threatening looking attacking position. Ding defended very resourcefully for a long time but after 37...Bg4 38.Qh4! would have won the exchange, although Nakamura did not think converting this advantage would have been easy. Ding had excellent chances to win game 2 after the poor move 33...Qe1? got Nakamura into trouble. Ding's 40.Qd5 looked attractive it was this move that lost him the advantage with computers suggesting 40.bxc5 instead but all this was pretty hard for a human to see. Games three and four were both correct draws. In the final Armageddon game Nakamura won the toss and chose black with draw odds. Nakamura also won the opening battle and was very comfortably heading for at least a draw until 21...f5?! which was not a good idea and white became instantly a little bit better. The game ended rather suddenly in Nakamura's favour after 28.Kg2? (28.Rxd8 or 28.Rdd2 had to be played) 28...b5! 29.Qd3 Qb7! with a deadly pin.

Round 6 Standings: Nakamura, Carlsen, Caruana 13pts, Ding 12pts, Nepomniachtchi, Firouzja 6pts, MVL 5pts, Giri 4pts.

All four games of the final Round 7 will be played on April 30th at 3pm: Ding-Carlsen, Nepomniachtchi-Firouzja, MVL-Nakamura and Giri-Caruana.