Until this round there were always plenty of matches lasting until the tiebreakers; this time, only one match requires a third day to find a winner. In fact, while the “men’s” round of 16 has only one match in eight making it to tiebreaks, the concurrent Women’s World Cup, which is in its round of eight, will see tiebreaks in three of the four matches!
It was almost entirely smooth sailing today for all of yesterday’s winners: Magnus Carlsen won a second game against Vasyl Ivanchuk - but that seemed to be due to Ivanchuk’s lack of desire to hold the worse half of a draw that would still send him packing from the event. Nijat Abasov also completed a shutout, defeating Saleh Salem in the round’s only upset. This was the one game that saw a game one winner have a few anxious moments before finishing the match. Salem played very aggressively, throwing everything at Abasov’s king, and had he played 23.Nxg7 or 25.Bxh6 it’s quite possible that Salem would have tied the match. (I don’t mean that Salem was winning, only that Abasov could easily have cracked under the heavy pressure.)
Leinier Dominguez, Arjun Erigaisi, and Dommaraju Gukesh all drew their games (vs. Alexey Sarana, Nils Grandelius, and Wang Hao, respectively) pretty easily to advance to the quarterfinals.
That left the three matches that featured draws on day 1. Two of them are finished. Fabiano Caruana impressively outplayed Jan-Krzysztof Duda with the black pieces; and the newly 18-year-old Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa took another scalp, defeat Ferenc Berkes in a nice game. Pragg found a long combination involving sacrifices that led to…an ending with equal material. The problem for his opponent was that material wouldn’t stay equal for long, and the young Indian GM easily converted his advantage.
That leaves the one match that will continue tomorrow: Ian Nepomniachtchi vs. Vidit Gujrathi. If Vidit wins, there will be four Indian players left in the final eight - and without former champion Viswanathan Anand having played in the tournament. Indian chess is looking incredibly promising. There are two Americans left, and there’s good news/bad news there. The good news is that the U.S. is guaranteed a semi-finalist in the World Cup, with the bad news being that this guarantee comes with a corresponding guarantee that one of the two will be eliminated. More on the round 6 pairings tomorrow, after the tiebreaks. For now, here is a selection from today’s games, and yesterday’s, too.