Nepomniachtchi plays 31. ... Bb2 after more than nine minutes, leaving him with 13min 52sec. And that move, the correct one that he’d missed on the last move and the move before, it’s now a blunder! Oh dear! Carlsen takes all of three seconds before responding with 32. Rc5.
Carlsen has spent more than three minutes inspecting the position. He finally plays 31. Kh2, putting his king on the same diagonal as black’s dark-squared bishop. That leaves him 3min 3sec for nine moves!
Nepomniachtchi answers with 30. ... h5 after four minutes. The computers indicate Bb2 could have been winning for black, but this is still an even position. The time crunch continues for Carlsen, who’s under five minutes ... four minutes ...
Nepomniachtchi plays 29. ... Be5. A retreat! “I think he’s missed a great opportunity there,” English grandmaster Simon Williams says on Chess24’s broadcast. “In these world championship matches you do not get many chances. It might still be good for black but that was a missed opportunity.”
Carlsen responds with 30. h4. Six minutes for 10 moves.
Carlsen reaches toward the board and pulls his hand back. And again! More indecision as the clock ticks, ticks, ticks down. Finally the champion pushes his pawn (29. e3) after more than eight minutes. He’s left with 9min 37sec for his next 11 moves. Nepomniachtchi is back at the board after having stepped away. Carlsen under immense pressure in need of highly precise play. This could well be the challenger’s best chance for a win in the entire 14-game match. High drama in Dubai!
Carlsen has been looking at this position for more than six minutes. The time situation is getting hairy for the champion. He’s got 12 moves to make in less than 12 minutes, or less than a minute per move, until the time control.
And Carlsen is going for it! He’s traded his queen for both of black’s rooks (26. Qxc8 Rxc8 27. Rxc8), a slight material advantage but leaving him without his most powerful piece. 27. ... Qd5 28. b4 a4 quickly follows. Game on!
Nepomniachtchi puts the question to Carlsen. He’s just attacked white’s queen with 25. ... Rac8 before stepping away from the board. Will the Norwegian retreat his queen and go on the defensive foot or exchange it for two rooks? The Norwegian supercomputer Sesse gives the slight edge to the former option.
A long, long think for Carlsen, who’s fallen behind Nepomniachtchi on time. He’s even made reaches toward the board on three separate occasions before withdrawing his hand. Rare show of indecision from the world champion. Finally Carlsen plays the solid 22. Rd2 after 22 minutes of deep thought, leaving him with a bit under 24 minutes to make 15 moves before gaining another hour after his 40th move.
Carlsen plays the ambitious 24. Rfd1 after exactly 10 and a half minutes. He’s still going for the win. Nepomniachtchi makes a quick response with the practical 24. ... Kg7, pushing his king up to a better square. “Things can still go wrong ... for both!” former world champion Vishy Anand says on Fide’s official broadcast. “They have to still play the game very carefully, but to me the position is equal.”
Nepomniachtchi plays 23. ... a5, which foils white’s designs on getting his knight to c6 by way b4. That leaves him with 39 minutes to make 17 moves. Carlsen enjoys a time advantage of more than 20 minutes but he’s using quite a bit of it here, spending more than 10 of them (and counting) mulling over his response.
Nepomniachtchi launches his queen forward to a centralized perch with 22. Qe4. Carlsen responds by getting his queen into the mix with 23. Qc2 after three and a half minutes. Nepomniachtchi has spent more than seven minutes (and counting) pondering his response. He’s below 40 minutes on the clock with 18 moves to go until the time control, when both players are due to receive an extra hour.
The exchanges begin. A pair of knights then light-squared bishops come off (19. Nxd4 Bxd4 20. Qa2 Bxg2 21. Kxg2) as expected. Nepomniachtchi puts Carlsen in check with his queen (21. ... Qb7+), leaving the champion with the choice to either step his king backward or block with the f-pawn.
And after two minutes, Carlsen opts for the former with 22. Kg1.
And Nepomniachtchi decides against exchanging queens with 17. ... gxf6 after six minutes. This keeps the position dynamic in line with the challenger’s style. After a three-minute think, Carlsen pushes his rook to an open file with 18. Rac1.
Carlsen plays 17. Bxf6. That means Nepomniachtchi will likely take back the bishop with Qxf6 followed by a queen exchange. He’s spent the last five minutes working out the lines.
Carlsen plays 16. Bg5 after four and a half minutes. Nepomniachtchi finds the correct response (16. ... Rfd8) inside a minute. Extraordinary. Carlsen is doing his best to take the fight to the challenger with creative approaches but the challenger is just so precise in response.
Nepomniachtchi thinks for nearly eight minutes before retreating with 14. ... Nc6. Will Carlsen make the knight exchange offered by the challenger or something more ambitious? And it’s the latter! Carlsen drops back his knight with 15. Nd3. Nepomniachtchi, who had stepped away from the board, returns to his chair and immediately plays 15. ... Bb6.
Carlsen makes a bit of a grimace after playing 13. Qb2. That leaves Nepomniachtchi with one playable option and he takes exactly two minutes before finding it: 13. ... Bb7. Carlsen quickly answers with 14. a3, which is best. The Norwegian supercomputer Sesse, once again, evaluates the position as dead even.
And Carlsen responds with 12. Nce5 after nearly 21 minutes. That leaves Nepomniachtchi with only one playable option to maintain the balance: Nb4. Will he find it? Unsurprisingly, he does. Nepomniachtchi plays 12. ... Nb4 after less than two minutes, putting Carlsen back on the clock.
Carlsen has spent the last 20 minutes (and counting) looking at this position. It’s not surprising he’s investing so much time: American grandmaster Robert Hess calls 11. ... b5 it “the best move Ian Nepomniachtchi has played in the world championship match so far”.
Carlsen plays 11. nxc4 after more than 12 minutes of thought. Nepomniachtchi reponds with the aggressive 11. ... b5, targeting the Norwegian’s knight. A promising start for the challenger.
Carlsen has gone into the think tank. He’s spent more than 10 minutes (and counting) pondering his response to 10. ... Nc6.
Some promising history for those hoping for blood today. The sixth game of world championship matches has traditionally been a contest that’s produced a decisive result. The list is long: Steinitz def Zukertort (1886), Chigorin def Steinitz (1889), Steinitz def Gunsberg (1891), Steinitz def Chigorin (1892), Lasker def Steinitz (1897), Bogoljubow def Alekhine (1929), Alekhine def Euwe (1937), Botvinnik def Bronstein (1951), Smyslov def Botvinnik (1957), Botvinnik def Smyslov (1958), Tal def Botvinnik (1960), Fischer def Spassky (1972), Korchnoi def Karpov (1981), Karpov def Kasparov (1984), Anand def Kramnik (2008), Carlsen def Anand (2013) and Carlsen def Anand (2014).
And while Game 6 of the 2018 match between Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana ended in a draw, it was an 80-move, six-and-a-half-hour epic that required a miraculous fightback from the world champion to salvage a half-point.
Nepomniachtchi spends nearly seven minutes looking at what’s essentially a novel position before deciding on 8. ... dxc4. If Carlsen’s strategy was to get his opponent out of his comfort zone as early as possible, it may be mission accomplished. The world champion immediately responds with 9. Qc2 before Nepomniachtchi plays 9. ... Qe7 after two and a half minutes.
And Carlsen plays 10. Nbd2! He’s offering a pawn sacrifice in exchange for long-term initiative, same as in the first two games. “To me, this looks like a completely new concept,” says American grandmaster Fabiano Caruana on the Chess.com broadcast.
Nepomniachtchi takes nearly four minutes before playing 3. ... e6. And the players continue blitzing out their opening moves: 4. Bg2 Be7 5. O-O O-O. This could be a direct transposition back into Game 2. But instead he plays 6. b3.
After 6. ... c5 7. dxc5 Bxc5 8. c4, the position is one that is very unfamiliar at the top level.
Carlsen opens with the same 1. d4 as Game 2. The players follow with 1. ... Nf6 2. Nf3 d5 3. g3 and Nepomniachtchi is having a think. It’s unclear what the opening is. Could be the Catalan with an untraditional move order.
Carlsen is first to arrive in the sound-proof studio for today’s game, several minutes before the first move. That’s new. Nepomniachtchi has arrived first for every previous game of this match with the world champion turning up at the last possible moment. We should be under way any moment now.
Wednesday’s peaceful result extended a run of 19 consecutive draws in classical world championship games. Carlsen drew the final two games with Sergey Karjakin in 2016, all 12 against Fabiano Caruana in 2018, then five straight to open this year’s tie with Nepomniachtchi. That has eclipsed the record of 17 consecutive draws set by Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov in their “timeless test” match in Moscow.
“I think there is some magical cutoff point where draws instead of just being normal they become a problem,” Carlsen said after Wednesday’s game. “But I don’t think we’ve crossed the Rubicon yet.”
Our Leonard Barden has filed his latest dispatch ahead of today’s sixth game. Barden, who’s written the Guardian’s chess column every week since September 1955, says the next three games will be crucial for Carlsen because the following two rest days before games nine and 11 will precede games where Nepomniachtchi will have the favored white pieces.
Game two has been the most revealing so far for what could happen with both sides outside their prep, as Carlsen misplayed his attack before Nepomniachtchi played too safe at a critical moment. Their memory banks and super-computer back-ups are in good shape, so the question is who will cope better as the nervous tension becomes acute in the last few games.
Carlsen’s plan B seems to be to test his opponent’s resilience with low-risk probes, but the ambience will change dramatically if and when one side scores the first win. “If” is a necessary qualification here, since Carlsen’s ongoing record of championship draws in classical games stands at 19 – the last two against Sergey Karjakin in 2016, all 12 against Fabiano Caruana in 2018, and now another five. This breaks the record of 17 consecutive draws set by Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov in their “timeless test” match in Moscow 1984-85.
Hello and welcome back for the sixth game of the World Chess Championship. The overall score in the showdown between Magnus Carlsen and Ian Nepomniachtchi in Dubai remains level at 2.5-all following draws in Game 1, Game 2, Game 3, Game 4 and Game 5 with nine scheduled contests remaining.
Supercomputers evaluating the moves from the opening four games had indicated it was the most accurate world title match in the event’s history and Wednesday’s fifth contest maintained that standard as the players remarkably combined for one inaccuracy between them. Regrettably for the 31-year-old challenger, the lapse (playing 20. Red1 instead of c4) was the opportunity Carlsen needed to escape from a highly uncomfortable position as black and negotiate a draw after 43 moves.
“Today is basically not about him defending well but me not using all the opportunities I had,” Nepomniachtchi said. “In general I believe these games are pretty much tense and despite it’s all draws, we are trying to play reasonable chess.”
For anyone just coming aboard, Carlsen, who turned 31 on Tuesday, has been at No 1 in the Fide rankings for 10 straight years and was considered the world’s best player even before he dethroned Vishy Anand for the title in 2013. Nepomniachtchi, also 31, is ranked No 5, having earned his place at the table by winning the eight-man candidates tournament in April.
The best-of-14-games match is taking place at the Dubai Exhibition Centre with the winner earning a 60% share of the €2m ($2.26m) prize fund if the match ends in regulation (or 55% if it’s decided by tie-break games, as happened in Carlsen’s second and third title defenses).
We’re a little more than a half-hour from today’s first move, so not much longer now.
Bryan will be here shortly. In the meantime here’s his report from Wednesday’s fifth game from Dubai.