As often happens, the day before a rest day served as a warm-up for the following day’s non-festivities. Six of the seven games were drawn in round 10 of the U.S. Championship, and as far as I can tell no one even came close to winning any of the drawn games. There was one decisive game, with Hans Niemann winning an up-and-down game against Elshan Moradiabadi (who has been having a dreadful tournament) when the latter missed a simple tactic he may have disregarded based on the possibility of an en passant capture, and that was that.
The upshot is that the relative standings at and near the top remain unchanged: Fabiano Caruana is in clear first, half a point ahead of Ray Robson and a point and a half ahead of group of six players (Sam Shankland, Samuel Sevian, Awonder Liang, Jeffery Xiong, Leinier Dominguez, and Dariusz Swiercz).
Here are the games, with (brief) comments to all the games. (Sort of.) Sunday is a rest day, and the action resumes on Monday with the antepenultimate round. (For those who, like me, enjoy fancy words, today’s was the preantepenultimate round.) Here are the pairings for round 11:
Shankland (5.5) - Aronian (4)
Caruana (7) - Xiong (5.5)
Dominguez (5.5) - Yoo (4)
Robson (6.5) - Liang (5.5)
Swiercz (5.5) - Sevian (5.5)
Niemann (4.5) - Lenderman (4.5)
So (4.5) - Moradiabadi (2)