The Week in Chess

The Skilling Open quarter finals finished today with three of the matches going to blitz tie-breaks and two of them going to a single final Armageddon game. The result of all the action was that Magnus Carlsen will face Ian Nepomniachtchi and Hikaru Nakamura will face Wesley So in the semifinals that start at 5pm GMT tomorrow.

Magnus Carlsen only needed to draw the second set against Anish Giri and after surviving some dicey moments in the first game he was not really in any trouble after that and all four games were drawn.

Hikaru Nakamura showed just how tough he is to put away when he plays online. Nakamura needed to beat Maxime Vachier-Lagrave in the rapid portion after his loss yesterday which he did with two fine wins on the white side of Najdorf Sicilian plus a draw with black. Nakamura then lost the first tie-break blitz game missing the correct way to draw in a huge time scramble. Then Nakamura lost the exchange in the must win second game but still managed a create enough complications to win the game, he then held on to draw the Armageddon game with black to go through.

Wesley So managed a comeback in his rapid match against Teimour Radjabov and then after two draws in the blitz tie-break Radjabov was the one who had to win with white in the Armageddon, sadly for him he never really got going in this game and was worse out of the opening which probably directly led to him dropping a rook on move 22. Ian

Nepomniachtchi also had to come from behind in the rapid having lost yesterday to Levon Aronian. Nepomniachtchi won the first and last rapid games to win 3-1 and also both blitz games to set up his match with Carlsen.

All 8 of these players will play in the next Champions Chess Tour event that takes place just after Christmas, the 8 players who were eliminated in the round robin stage aren't guaranteed at all to feature, Chess24 Premium members can vote for one player to be reinvited and they will later vote on a list of players who haven't played so far.