Draws are more than enough

For Magnus Carlsen, draws are more than enough at the moment. Yesterday and today he agreed to quick draws against Onischuk and Jakovenko and so he's almost sure of another tournament victory now. New games with comments.

Magnus can't really use the excuse of Euro 2008 anymore: by now there's no reason to leave the chess board early to watch the football instead, because by now these games don't start before 21:45 local time!

But of course, for the moment he has enough reason to be satisfied with half points. OK, his formidable two-point lead over his closest (all Ukrainian!) rivals Karjakin, Eljanov and Ivanchuk was reduced to a 1.5 point gap with Eljanov, who won today, but still Carlsen just needs another half point tomorrow, with White against Volokitin, to secure at least a shared tournament victory. And so his last-round encounter could be irrelevant but it's interesting nonetheless, since it's against his somewhat under-exposed colleague Sergei Karjakin.

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Carlsen-Onischuk: the former comfortably drawing his way to tournament victory, the latter satisfied with half a point as the tailender

Ivanchuk, concentrating, just playing his own tournament, as always

Svidler, on seven draws, a win and a loss now, against Karjakin, now on six draws, two wins and one loss

By the way, today was Svidler's birthday - the grandmaster from St Petersburg was born 32 years ago

Links:

• Official website
• Games in PGN