Magnus Carlsen

In round 3 and 4 yesterday the players continued to make blunders and typing errors.
The surprisingly high number of mistakes is in my opinion partly a coincidence, and we will see less of them the last 3 days. (Topalov is normally a very strong blindfold player who is usually not dropping pieces, and Magnus will get used to the from-square - to-square notation as he has not yet lost touch with the blindfold position itself.)
But the fact that they have to type the from-to move, check it on the wall screen and press the clock with only 10 second increments (versus 20 in Monaco), does not leave much room for thinking and obviously affects the quality of the games when in time-trouble. 

As white against X.Bu Magnus felt he was simply a pawn up in the middle game but after Qxd5 he had missed Rd8 (and only expected Qc3+ and Qxe3).
Still he was probably better with Rook, bishop and pawn and active pieces for the queen but lost the long endgame. After the game he was quite disgusted with the his play and was eager to get revenge.
This is not easy as black but thought he was slightly better when he declined repetition of moves playing Nd7-f8-g6 instead of Nf6.
He was hoping to put pressure on white due to the week d-pawn but after Nc7 he got slight problems instead.
A pawn down, but not really worse arrording to himself, he noticed that Bu's 44^th move Kd3-e4 was erroneous as the king was already on e4, but as it appeared on the screen and the arbiter did not intervene, he thought "maybe it was at d3 after all and I have to make a move anyway because of the time trouble". They played on for about 15 moves without the live monitors outside the room showing any progress, and was not stopped by the arbiters until Bu pointed out that Magnus move h5-h7 was erroneous as the pawn was already on h6.
The irony was that Magnus had won two pawns (a and h-pawn) during these 15 moves and he thought he was winning. But, (I guess in order to be able to continue the game at all in a way acceptable to their computer system), the arbiter decided that they had to start from move 44 again! (I'm not blaming the arbiter who was in an impossible position.) Relative to normal chess an illegal move many moves back discovered during reconstruction would not have such unfortunate consequences as the players would simply play on from the final position.
 When they reconvened after some 10 minutes, they immediately repeated moves. Draw. (Maybe the young Chinese repeated moves partly as a guest due to the circumstances earlier in the game.) 

After drawing with white Topalov seems to outplay Harikrisna as black but in beginning time trouble he again blundered a piece (on c5 allowing bxc5).
Last year he won convincingly against Polgar 3-1 and we certainly expect him to be back in this tournament. 

Polgar had an advantage as white against Karjakin but after a serious mistake she had to fight for the draw.
In game two Karjakin played a nice piece sack giving him pawns on f5 and e6 and control of the d-line and he finished the game in style. 

Prior to day 3 X.Bu is in the lead with 8 points ahead of Magnus, Karjakin and Harikrisna on 5 and Topalov and Polgar with 4. 

Today Magnus plays black against his fellow youngster S.Karjakin at 18:30 and white at 19:30.  

Henrik Carlsen
Bilbao, October 18th