2017 Champions Showdown, Day 2

Some interesting chess is being played, but the quality of the games is decreasing as the time control gets shorter, thanks especially to the lack of increment. The last rounds were particularly horrible: in their penultimate game Dominguez beat So in a time scramble where So was better on the board and on the clock, but Dominguez moved faster, and both sides engaged in quasi-illegal to illegal behavior (because the board and pieces are slick enough to host a mini-curling match, the pieces rarely wound up where they were supposed to; additionally, Dominguez made two-handed captures, which is certainly against FIDE's rules, as we learned from a Nakamura game back in 2016, if I recall correctly). And in the final round Caruana left his queen en prise in a winning position (and with some time on his clock!), while Topalov failed to defeat Nakamura despite having an extra piece.

One thing that has been instructive, from a chess point of view, is that we've repeatedly seen (both days) that the anti-Berlin plan of playing 4.d3, taking on c6, and then mounting a kingside attack with castling queenside and playing g4 is surprisingly toothless. And there have been other interesting opening ideas as well. But the lack of time, and probably some fatigue as well, is spoiling the games and severing the logical connection of what's happening during most of the game and its final result.

Anyway, here are the results: Nakamura won two games and drew four against Topalov, which meant that he went 16-8 in this section on the 4-2-0 scoring. Since he led after the first day 12.5-7.5, his overall lead is 28.5-15.5.

Grischuk went +2-1=3 against Caruana, winning the day 14-10. They split on day one, so Grischuk has a narrow 24-20 lead overall.

Dominguez went +3-1=2 against So. Thus, like Nakamura, he won the day 16-8, and since he - again like Nakamura - went 12.5-7.5 the first day he likewise leads overall with a 28.5-15.5 score.

Today there will be eight rounds of game/10 with the same pairings, and it is also the first day of Magnus Carlsen vs. Ding Liren, who will contest four g/30s.

The action starts in 20 minutes or so (2 p.m. ET/1 p.m. local time in St. Louis).