The main news of yesterday’s 6th round was of course the visit of World Champion Magnus Carlsen. In case you missed his excellent intervention on the live show, you can either watch the replay or just read the highlights in the following piece by Peter Doggers: http://www.chess.com/news/magnus-carlsen-visits-reykjavik-where-mamedyarov-lami-and-fier-lead-8850
As for the actual tournament, we had a huge amount of extremely exciting battles yesterday. While the top 2 boards ended in draws between Mamedyarov-Navara (although the latter had excellent winning chances) and Gao-Eljanov, board 3 was a crazy game between Gupta and Fier, where even the World Champion didn’t have a clue about what was going on when he looked at the position on the live show. However Fier ended up deciding the game in his favour, as did Erwin l’Ami on board 4, and so both those players joined Mamedyarov in the lead.
They are followed by a group of 8 players on 5/6, the most notable of which is Jon Viktor Gunnarsson, who drew his encounter against Melkumyan and even came very close to winning.
In the evening the traditional blitz tournament took place, where Gupta and Rasmussen shared the first place with 8/9, while young Norwegian FM Christiansen showed a great performance to come in 3rd with 7/9. You can find the final standings as well as detailed results from that event here: http://chess-results.com/tnr165552.aspx?lan=1&art=1&rd=9&flag=30&wi=821
The top pairing of today’s round 7 is l’Ami-Mamedyarov, while Fier takes on Eljanov, Stefansson battles Granda Zuniga, Naroditsky faces Gao and Gunnarsson plays Hansen.
As usual you can follow the live games at 3pm GMT on http://www.reykjavikopen.com/live-games/ and the live commentary show on http://www.chess.com/tv . Make sure you don’t miss out on the action as things are heating up here in Reykjavik!
Fiona Steil-Antoni
