The Week in Chess

Magnus Carlsen took an almost unassailable 6-3 lead with just five game left of his World Chess Championship defence against Jan Nepomniachtchi. There will be plenty of time to dissect the match afterwards but it seems to me that Nepomniachtchi is suffering the downsides of his style and approach to the game. Nepomniachtchi is an instinctive player who can drive opponents into time trouble and bad positions and defeat them with little apparent effort. The downside of this is when things are not working quite correctly there's less to fall back on. Nepomniachtchi, most likely through nerves and tiredness, is missing key moments and is being imprecise - sometimes this doesn't matter so very much but occasionally it does. It's all adding up to this disaster.

Today Nepomniachtchi yet again got a little something out of the opening against Carlsen, but he missed the moment - he played 15.bxa3 fairly quickly when 15.b4 would have caused Carlsen far more problems. Carlsen was working hard at the board and was a long way behind on the clock, but moving quickly clearly cost Nepomniachtchi something here. That said Carlsen had his own moment of luck in this game - 23...Ng4 wasn't a bad move - 23...Nd7 was probably a bit better - but Carlsen as candidly admitted he completely missed 24.Qe1 and so was fairly fortunate this position wasn't worse than it was for him.

Nepomniachtchi didn't feel he was under any pressure or that there was any danger lurking in the position. This led him to make the move 27.c5?? without checking the consequences. Carlsen immediately realised something was wrong - he had already calculated that this wasn't working and after checking these calculations he played 27...c6 winning the bishop on b7 and the game.

Nepomniachtchi didn't know he had blundered until 27...c6 appeared on the board. It was Nepomniachtchi's "bad luck" that c5 had actually been part of the reason the bishop was now trapped. Already offstage Nepomniachtchi thought for 19 minutes before returning to the board to try and struggle on - he came up with just about the maximum resistance possible - but the position remained lost.

Game 10 takes place on Wednesday 8th December 2021 12:30 GMT Carlsen-Nepomniachtchi. Score Carlsen 6-3 Nepomniachtchi with 5 games to go.