The Week in Chess

The FIDE World Chess Championship in Dubai resumed today after its first rest day. Game four took place on Magnus Carlsen's birthday - he has reasonable memories of playing on this day - winning as he did the tie-break match against Sergey Karjakin in 2016.

Today Carlsen had the white pieces said that he expected the Petroff - Nepomniachtchi had used it in a game in the Candidates and that he was ready for it. "I tried something concrete - it didn't work. That's a normal result. I didn't expect him to have missed the line I played completely but in some other iterations there can be a lot of difficult decisions to make for black. But I think the way that he played there was just - there are some different tries - nothing. The state of modern chess - not much else to say."

Nepomniachtchi confirmed he knew Carlsen's try - the novelty 18.Nh4 and he supposed many other Petroff experts knew of it. He said he might have liked to try the move himself with the white pieces. His task today was not to mix up his lines and get in trouble in a line that he knew to be safe for black with correct play.

There was rapid simplification and Carlsen, after a long think on move 30 about the only real try for an advantage 30.d6 decided there was no mileage in it and forced a draw by repetition with 30.Ne8+.

Score 2-2 after four games. Game five on December 1st 12:30 GMT.