Ding scores his first win, Alekseenko holds Nepomniachtchi to draw
In another exciting day of the candidates, even though 3 results ended in peace, some of the games were still pretty exciting. Almost everyone thought that the top seed, Fabiano Caruana would surely dominate against the Chinese Grandmaster who went 0/2. Ding Liren even stumbled in the opening after Caruana's team prepared a novelty that would make Ding think a lot. However, Ding hustled and brought home his first win this tournament. Alekseenko was able to play good defence and drew against Nepo, who is one of the current tournament leaders. MVL and Giri were both happy with a draw as the result, so the dust settled quickly. Grischuk was pressing Wang Hao in a slightly better endgame until Grischuk missed a way for Wang Hao to hold a draw. Without further ado, let's start with the frenchman's game.
Grischuk was nicely consolidating his small advantage until he completely forgot about Ne4. If he had played Bc2 or Bb1 to put more pressure on the d5 pawn, he could have hoped that Wang Hao would crack under the pressure, since both of them were in serious time pressure during that moment of the game.
This was definitely a very tricky game. Alekseenko had to find several hard moves in time pressure to defend against Nepo. Example: Kf2!! The opening in general wasn't played very well by Alekseenko, and black quickly equalized and took a slight advantage. However, there wasn't a clear cut win because of Alekseenko's brilliant defence.
There were some crazy lines in this game that could have lead to major chaos. You can check out the game with an engine if you want to, but I didn't want to put all of those lines in the game to bore you out. After Caruana played h6, it was clear that Ding would have enough time to guide his king to shelter and keep the center pawns. After h6, it was mostly desperation by Caruana so there wasn't a lot to analyze.
Here are the standings after Round 3:
| # | Fed | Name | Rtg | Perf | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | Pts | SB |
| 1-3 | Ian Nepomniachtchi | 2774 | 2866 | ½ | 1 | ½ | 2.0/3 | 2.25 | ||||||
| 1-3 | Maxime Vachier-Lagrave | 2767 | 2923 | ½ | 1 | ½ | 2.0/3 | 2.25 | ||||||
| 1-3 | Wang Hao | 2762 | 2902 | ½ | 1 | ½ | 2.0/3 | 2.25 | ||||||
| 4 | Fabiano Caruana | 2842 | 2757 | ½ | 0 | 1 | 1.5/3 | 2 | ||||||
| 5 | Alexander Grischuk | 2777 | 2745 | ½ | ½ | ½ | 1.5/3 | 2.5 | ||||||
| 6 | Ding Liren | 2805 | 2670 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1.0/3 | 1.5 | ||||||
| 7-8 | Anish Giri | 2763 | 2648 | 0 | ½ | ½ | 1.0/3 | 2 | ||||||
| 7-8 | Kirill Alekseenko | 2698 | 2678 | ½ | 0 | ½ | 1.0/3 | 1.75 |
Ding really hustled today, here are Fabi's and Ding's accuracy percentages:
Here are my predictions for Round 4:
MVL 1/2-1/2 Grischuk
Caruana 1/2-1/2 Nepo
Ding 1-0 Giri
Hao 1-0 Alekseenko
Here is the chess.com broadcast:
And it would be great if you guys could fill out the Daily Fun! https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1uL9P8QAKlUNbvwQgd4kL0lJ5uW4sA1_wNXbz9W1jo8E/edit
