The Week in Chess

All the games of the fifth round of the Norway Chess tournament were drawn.

Hikaru Nakamura had a big advantage against Arju Erigaisi but 27...Nd7? (Na6!) threw away his chances. Wei Yi too was close to winning against Gukesh until 29.Qd2? (b7!) Fabiano Caruana was pushing for a while against Magnus Carlsen but the position then became close to equal. 43...g5? was a serious error from Carlsen and if Caruana had found 44.Ke3 he would have been winning according to the engines, although I'm not sure it was that easy to work out. Erigaisi, Wei Yi and Carlsen won the Armageddon tie-break games. Carlsen leads on 9.5/15 and Caruana is in second place on 8 points. In the women's event Humpy Koneru leads after beating Lei Tingjie in an Armageddon game. Vaishali's win over Sarasadat Khademalsharieh was the only decisive classical game.

The Stepan Avagyan Memorial had three decisive games in round 3. As I talked about after round 2, classical events can get bogged down in draws, in that respect this round was good news. Aravindh beat Xu Xiangyu, Dmitrij Kollars beat Benjamin Gledura and Aram Hakobyan beat Nodirbek Yakubboev. Aravindh, Hakobyan and Kollars lead on 2/3.

Michael Adams won the 3rd Cambridge International Open on tie-break from Brandon Clarke after both finished on 7/9. Adams finally played number two seed Sergei Tiviakov in the last round and the game seemed a fairly well played draw.

The French Team Championships Top 16 finishes today, as does the Norway Open.