Magnus Carlsen

Yesterday Magnus was white against Onischuk. In response to the 10...Bd6 line in the Catalan that Magnus won with as black against Eljanov, he played 11.Be3 instead of Eljanov's Ng5.
Onischuk managed to play the e5-break securing a reasonably equal position.
After a long thought, Magnus found an interesting continuation based on 17.Nc6 in practice sacrificing the e-pawn. But when he looked at the screen in the rest room after Bxc6, he immidiately saw that his plans had been flawed. 21.Re4 does not work with the king on g1. Black has Qf3. 
Hence he had to play 21.h3 etc and although there is some compensation for the pawn but black is maybe better. At the same time the position is fairly complicated and both has to play accurately.
After 24....g6 Magnus could not find anything better than 25.Rd5 Qc4 26.Rd4 Qd3 etc. 
If he captures on the c4, then Na5 c3 bxc3 is a dead drawn ending, so he repeated moves instead.
Draw on a day when he don't get much from the opening and makes a considerable oversight is a reasonable result though :-)

Fortunately we saw three decisive games.
Van Wely outplayed Volokitin to score his second win, but due to his many losses, he is still at -2.
Alekseev won seemingly effortless in slightly better ending against Nisipeanu.
Ivanchuk managed to get an edge as black against Shirov after the Gruenfeld opening, and won in style with a nice combination involving an exchange sacrifice.

After 8 rounds Magnus was still two points ahead of Ukrainian pursuers Ivanchuk, Karjakin and Eljanov.
1st tie-break is mutual result, and Magnus has beaten two of them (Ivanchuk and Eljanov).
His only realistic challenger to win the tournament seems to be Karjakin whom Magnus plays with black in the last round.

Some of the players got slighty food poisoned lately. During lunch today Jakovenko and a couple of others complained about this unfortunate incident.
 
This may certainly explain Jakovenko's complete lack of ambition in his game against Magnus today.
As white, Jakovenko played the English opening and a very drawish line.
When offered a draw after white's 16th move, Magnus was a bit uncertain about what to do. But as you probably already know, he decided to accept the draw offer.
Again, a reasonable result for Magnus, although,of course, the game was not what the specatators had hoped for.

I'll keep my fingers crossed for some decisive results in the remaining five games today :-)

Tomorrow Magnus has white against Volokitin. He has a terrible score against this opponent, but they haven't played for two years so it is time for revenge!

Henrik C.
Foros, Crimea, June 17th, 2008