The Week in Chess

Ding Liren moved into clear third place with a brief 16 move win in the final decisive Armageddon game against Maxime Vachier Lagrave. In the other game of the day Ian Nepomniachtchi won beat Anish Giri 2.5-1.5 in a fairly low key match against the Dutchman. These two matches completed Round 3 after which Carlsen leads a point clear of Nakamura with Ding Liren moving into third place.

Ding is the only player who is playing late at night in his home country and there's already speculation this might be negatively affecting his performance. Today the four rapid games all were drawn with some interesting but not particularly thrilling play. In the Armageddon tie-break MVL chose black and played the Slav which seems to be a new addition for this event. Ding varied from his earlier 4.e3 with 4.Nc3 but MVL still played 4...Bf5 which is a correct move vs e3 but not against Nc3. MVL tried to justify his error by fishing in murky waters but only made things much worse and had to resign on move 16.

Anish Giri is just woefully out of form in this event. After a draw in game one against Ian Nepomniachtchi he was under pressure for much of game two until 44.Qa6? allowed him to get the Queen's off for equality. Yet still Giri managed to lose the game with later mistakes. In game three Giri played well and built up a winning position but then he wrecked it all with 35.Rb1? (35.f3! or even 35.Kf1 were winning) it's just really hard to imagine him making all these errors normally. The final game was also drawn.

Round 3 standings: Carlsen 8pts, Nakamura 7pts, Ding 6pts, MVL, Nepomniachtchi, Caruana 5pts, Giri, Firouzja 0pts.

Round 4 Day 1 pairings Fri 24th April 2020 15:00 BST: Carlsen-MVL, Firouzja-Caruana

Round 4 Day 2 pairings Sat 25th April 2020 15:00 BST: Nakamura-Nepomniachtchi, Ding-Giri