Sinquefield Cup, Round 3: Four More Draws, and Grischuk Beats Nakamura

Today's draws were meatier than their predecessor, even if they were identical in quantity. The game of the round was, like yesterday's, a marathon, with Alexander Grischuk squeezing out a win over Hikaru Nakamura - with Black - in 89 moves. The game saw a trendy line of the trendy Italian, one in which White allows a quick ...d5 and tries to punish Black by wrecking his queenside structure at the cost of the two bishops. On this occasion it was the bishops that proved more valuable, even if it took a very long time to prove it.

With the win Grischuk has made it a four-way tie atop the leaderboard, as he, Magnus Carlsen, Shakhriyar Mamedyarov, and Levon Aronian share the lead at +1. Oddly, the three players with minus scores (Nakamura, Wesley So, and Sergey Karjakin) are three of the four overall leaders of the Grand Chess Tour. They still have plenty of time to right the ship, but if they don't their qualification to London may not be secure.

In the draw department: Aronian missed a couple of nice opportunities to preserve a significant edge against Carlsen, who was "too excited" by his win yesterday and slept poorly. Mamedyarov's game with Fabiano Caruana was a great fight in which both players demonstrated very high-level chess. Caruana was pressing, a la Carlsen, and Mamedyarov had to play very accurately to stay alive. He did, and maintains his #2 spot in the world rankings (he nosed ahead of Caruana after round 1 of the tournament). Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and So contested the Berlin ending, and So had no trouble neutralizing MVL's novelty and achieving an outwardly easy draw. Likewise, Karjakin achieved nothing against Viswanathan Anand on the white side of another theoretical Ruy Lopez - this time the Open Variation - and Anand found it an easy technical job to split the point. The achievement was as much to Karjakin's "credit" as Anand's, however, as the former was understandably looking to get on the scoreboard after losses in rounds 1 and 2.

Today's games, with my notes, are here. These are the pairings for round 4, tomorrow:

• Mamedyarov (2) - Aronian (2)
• Caruana (1.5) - Nakamura (1)
• Grischuk (2) - Vachier-Lagrave (1.5)
• So (1) - Karjakin (.5)
• Anand (1.5) - Carlsen (2)