The Week in Chess

Nothing is decided after seven rounds of the Norway Chess tournament with four leaders and a gap of just a point between first and last. Sergey Karjakin joined Magnus Carlsen, Vladmir Kramnik and Fabiano Caruana in the lead after the most unlikely of wins against Anish Giri in 131 moves and over seven and a half hours play.

Karjakin's win against Anish Giri came in the most unlikely of manners. Giri got a small advantage but there didn't seem any way of improving his position and so the players went round and round with little change until about move 53. Karjakin then transferred his knight to b6 where it was exchange and he trapped his own rook. Then Giri manoevered for a long time until he seemed to have made progress but in the end just as Karjakin was repeating for a draw Giri tried to avoid the draw and blundered his entire position away in 131 moves.

Magnus Carlsen played a variation of the Gruenfeld previously viewed as being harmless and achieved an ending where Alexander Grischuk had to defend for his life for 74 moves. Grischuk did a pretty good job to even hold this even though there were no clear winning chances for Carlsen.

Fabiano Caruana was on the edge of defeat against Veselin Topalov in a complicated Sicilian. It isn't quite clear where things wrong but the game turned around and Caruana was eventually better but the game finished in 66 moves.

Vladimir Kramnik came quite close to a brilliant positional win against Levon Aronian but just as he thought he'd finally solved all the problems Aronian found a brilliant counter-attack that forced a draw.

The shortest game of the day was between Peter Svidler and Simen Agdestein. Svidler had earlier expressed doubt about Agdestein's choice of variation in the French but when he came to look at it he couldn't find anything very clear and after a few hours had to call off the hunt. He played the Reti instead and hoped for a complicated battle but in fact it was he who had to struggle and was happy to repeat.

Rest day Wednesday.

Round 7 Standings: Kramnik, Carlsen, Karjakin, Caruana 4pts, Agdestein, Grischuk 3.5pts, Topalov, Aronian, Svidler and Giri 3pts.

Round 8 Pairings Thursday 12th June 2014: Aronian – Caruana, Karjakin – Kramnik, Grischuk – Giri, Svidler – Carlsen and Agdestein – Topalov.