Magnus Carlsen

In round 4 two of the matches were decided. Kamsky beat Bacrot and Leko Gurevich with the impressive score 3,5-0,5.
Magnus had a bad day "at work" and lost to Aronian as black in a Bogo-indian, where he several times discovered the flaws in his calculations just after making a move. He thought he was back in the game after Rd5, but also later made too many mistakes to survive against a top player like Aronian. 

Until round 5 Magnus was the only player who had equalized his match, could he do it again?
Remarkably the game showed many similarities with round 3, in that a promising attack was transposed into a better endgame that was decided by mating threats with a pawn on f6. After the game both players agreed that Aronian's Ba6 was not the best and the b4-push premature.
Magnus thought his plan of defending the queen side with Bc1 and Rb1 in combination with e5 would give him a clear advantage, and it probably did. After spending a lot of time calculating alternative attacking continuations he didn't find anything concrete and opted for the better endgame. It was not clear how and if he could win until he found the f4 plan. At that stage Aronian looked comfortable until he discovered the winning line (that was played). (If Aronian had advanced his c-pawn and Queened he would have been mated). 

We saw another comeback as Polgar finished off Bareev with a nice attack to reach 2-3 before the final round.
The other 4 games were drawn so that Grischuk won 3,5-1,5 against Malahkov, and we face a very exciting round 6 with Aronian - Carlsen and Kasimzhanov - Gelfand at 2,5-2,5 while Shirov has to win with white and Polgar and Ponomariov with black to equalize their matches trailing 2-3 against Adams, Bareev and Rublevsky. 

My impression is that both media and internet spectators thoroughly enjoy and appreciate the great nerve and excitement brought by staging these 8 candidate matches simultaneously.  

A comment also on dress code. In the first round the players were encouraged to put on a T-shirt from the main sponsor Rosenergomash. As there was no contractual obligation to do this, most did out of good-will, and some changed into a preferred shirt after the photo session. In general I think the players dress well. Costumes vary a bit with age and personal style which is something we should appreciate and allow.
The stage looks tailor-made for candidate matches and altogether the show looks very impressive from our places in the audience.   

Going into round 6, Aronian-Carlsen has maybe been the most interesting match featuring the top-seed against the youngster, four decisive games so far and two comebacks, and it feels a bit unreasonable that one of them will have to leave the Cycle today or tomorrow. But that's life....

 Henrik Carlsen
Elista, June 2nd 2007