The players have found their second wind, and rather than repeating the draw, draw, tiebreaks pattern we’ve seen a lot of the last two rounds, today we’re seeing bloodshed instead.
It starts at the top, as Magnus Carlsen obtained a small measure of revenge for some painful defeats Vasyl (the artist formerly known as “Vassily”) Ivanchuk inflicted upon him. With White in a Catalan/Bogo-Indian Carlsen tried a rare ninth move (9.h4) but soon discovered that Ivanchuk was well-prepared even there. Black was fine until around move 22, when the decision to take on f3 soon led to a lost position. Carlsen’s play after that wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough.
In other games, Leinier Dominguez won a tactical gem against Alexey Sarana, Nijat Abasov capitalized on a later error by Saleh Salem (48…Bf3?) to pull out a tactical battle, Nils Grandelius failed to hold an equal position in his technical battle with Arjun Erigaisi, and - finally - Dommaraju Gukesh outplayed Wang Hao with the black pieces.
The games Vidit-Nepomniachtchi, Caruana-Duda, and Berkes-Praggnanandhaa all finished in a draw.
After a very long day of travel I'm too tired to post any games, but later today I’ll post my analysis of the day 1 highlights.