The Week in Chess

Norway Chess is being led by Fabiano Caruana with 6 points out of 9 after three rounds, the women's event is being led by Anna Muzychuk and Humpy Koneru also with 6/9. The event employs unique scoring system of 3 points for a win, 0 points for a loss and then 1.5 points or 1 point for a draw depending on the results of an Armageddon game.

As reported Caruana lost to Hikaru Nakamura in Round 1 but since then he beat Wei Yi (25.Rxh5? cost Wei Yi the game) and then he took advantage of a couple of errors from Arjun Erigaisi in Round 3 to win that game also. The match up of Round 2 was Hikaru Nakamura against Magnus Carlsen, their classical game was a well played, if a little dull, draw. Nakamura won the Armageddon game. World Champion Gukesh lost again blundering in a difficult endgame against Erigaisi. In the women's event Anna Muzychuk beat Humpy Koneru taking advantage of a late blunder where Humpy swapped into a lost endgame with 56...Qxe4.

In Round 3 Gukesh got off the mark by defeating Hikaru Nakamura. Nakamura offered a draw on move 30 which Gukesh turned down, he was still a little better, and a draw offer often means a player is uncomfortable with their position. The next move Nakamura blundered and Gukesh went on to win. Magnus Carlsen couldn't break through against Wei Yi and then lost a second Armageddon tie-break in a row.

The Norway Chess Open also takes place in Stavanger at the same time and Vitaly Kunin and Platon Galperin have started with 4/4.

The 6th Stepan Avagyan Memorial 2025 The 6th Stepan Avagyan Memorial takes place Thu 29th May to Fri 6th Jun 2025 in Jermuk, Armenia. Players: R Praggnanandhaa, Aravindh Chithambaram V, Samuel Sevian, Nodirbek Yakubboev, Benjamin Gledura, Buhl Bjerre Jonas, Robert Hovhannisyan, Dmitrij Kollars, Xu Xiangyu and Hakobyan Aram.

Titled Tuesday Blitz 27th May saw Wesley So win the early (his round 9 win against Rinat Jumabayev was key) and Tuan Minh Le, the late, both have won before but the absence of Carlsen and Nakamura couldn't hurt their prospects.

Hans Moke Niemann's rematch against Daniil Dubov in Moscow finished with him winning in overtime 10.5-9.5. They were tied at 9-9 after the scheduled 18 games.

The 3rd Cambridge International Open 2025 and French Interclubs Top 16 continue.

There are some lightly annotated games below where I used ChessBase to produce some notes first and then I looked them over and tidied them up.