Magnus Carlsen

In my understanding Dominguez Perez has some very good opening preparations and is a strong tactical player. In this light yesterdays preparation seems like a good strategy from Magnus and second Kjetil Lie.
Against Magnus' 1.e4 Dominguez played the Najdorf, and Magnus could follow a prepared line as they had found that the position after 12.a3! Bxb3 13.cxb3 may not be as simple for black as the computers want you to believe.
Magnus gives a lot of credit to Kjetil Lie for this preparation, great work! 

And indeed, despite the knight on d4 black faces several challenges. After some preparations Magnus could play Bg4, f4 and f5 without any real weaknesses in his own camp.
Dominguez was getting short on time when he played 23... Ra8 walking into the tactical threat Bd7, Nd5, Nf6 etc after 24.fxg6.
Rather than sacking the exchange he played 27.... Rc1 and after 28.h4! Magnus is probably already winning.
This must have been Dominguez' view as well as he spent most of his remaining time before sacking his queen for a rook and pawn and some potential counterplay instead of the more materialistic continuation Qd8 29.Rxc1 Bxc1 30.Qf1 attacking both c1 and f7.
However, Magnus found an easy way of realizing his material advantage by exchanging pawns on the queen side and attacking f7 while avoiding black mating threats and gradually improved his position.
Dominguez fought on until move 42 when he was facing mate or further loss of material.
Seemingly a great game by Magnus, (winning round 3 by 1,5-0,5)!
He felt quite well and confident today and will hopefully enjoy his day off tomorrow. 

Having reached round 4 the burden of expectations should be firmly removed from his shoulders. Despite playing 3 lower rated opponents the accumulated probability of reaching round 4 was probably less than 50%. (The number of top seeds reaching round 4 may not support this conclusion though. We'll see tomorrow.) 

All the 5 winners from yesterday secured direct access to round 4 by drawing their opponents. Magnus, Shirov (with black!), Alekseev, Akopian and Ponomariov followed suit by winning today leaving 6 tie-break matches tomorrow featuring strong players like Ivanchuk, Aronian, Svidler and Grischuk. 

Magnus will play 7^th seed Michael Adams (2729) on Monday with the white pieces in game 1.

So far Magnus has played only the highest rated opponents possible (Naiditsch, Dominguez Perez and Adams) but if he advances to round 5 he will play Wang or Cheparinov as Mamedyarov was eliminated by the latter.   

The win today also implies that Magnus will improve his rating on the next FIDE list irrespective of the outcome of the rest of the tournament :-)

H. Carlsen
Lommedalen, December 1^st, 2007