For the eleventh game of the World Chess Championship Match, world champion, Magnus Carlsen switched his opening once again and went for 1.e4. His challenger, Fabiano Caruana could not have been happier as he got to play his favourite Petroff Defence. With black, Caruana neutralized the position comfortably to steer the game to a draw in just a little over 2 hours, leaving the match score tied at 5½-all. In terms of time, this was the shortest game of the match.

The penultimate installment of the match had begun on a humourous note after Carlsen’s former world title challenger, Sergey Karjakin, played 1.b4 as the ceremonial first move. Karjakin, who happened to be with his wife in London, had been invited to open the game. Soon afterwards, Karjakin took to Twitter to thank his partners in crime, Viswanathan Anand and Chess.com journalist, Maria Emelianova.

After the move had evoked laughter from all around (since the broadcast had begun by the time the move was made), Carlsen replaced it with his choice of 1.e4. In the Petroff Defence that ensued, the world champ did not repeat the 3.Nd3 side line which he had played Game 6 but instead, chose the main line with 5.Nc3.

This usually leads to a fierce game with players castling on opposite wing. This game was no exception. Kings soon went opposite ways. For the first seven moves, the players followed the line they had discussed previously at the Sinquefield Cup. Caruana was the first to deviate this time with 7…0-0 (instead of 7…Nc6 that was played at the Sinquefield Cup).

While the opening did allude to an exciting game, Carlsen decided to put the brakes on with his 13.c4 by offering a trade of queens. After Caruana took the exchange, the sting was out of the position. More exchanges followed as Carlsen went for 15.Nh4 and by the 25th move, the players were left in a dead equal endgame with bishops of opposite colour.

Carlsen pressed on in the endgame, trying to draw blood out of stone. His inspiration, he said, was the 1975 game between Ljubomir Ljubojevic and Anatoly Karpov played in Milan, Italy, where the former world champion managed to pull out a win from a similar position.

“I don’t think there is anything real. I mean, every chess player knows the game Ljubojevic-Karpov in which Karpov won some ending like this. But yeah, the drawing margin is very high.”

While the position didn’t offer much, Carlsen tried a few tactical tricks to see if the challenger fell for any. But Caruana had also foreseen these tactical resources and made no mistake defending against them and by the 55th move, after Carlsen’s last tactical threat had been parried successfully, a draw was agreed.

After the game, Carlsen praised his challenger’s opening preparation. “He’s been very well prepared so far and I haven’t gotten much with white. I mean, and those are the cold, hard facts.”

Another interesting detail was Carlsen’s admission of having been caught off guard by Caruana’s opening. But then, this exact variation of the Petroff had been mentioned in the infamous leaked video that contained Caruana’s preparation details.

“Yeah, the Nd7-Nf6 line was there (in the video), obviously, but he managed to surprise me nevertheless. If that was, indeed, some king of gambit, it worked well,” Carlsen said.

In the last remaining game of the match, it will be the challenger, Fabiano Caruana, who will have the white pieces. If the final game is also drawn, the winner will be determined via a tiebreak in faster time controls.

In his previous world championship match against Karjakin, Carlsen had voluntarily gone into the tiebreaks and had emerged victorious. Back then, however, it was Carlsen who had the white pieces in the final game.

Answering whether this will make a difference, Carlsen said, “Psychologically, it’s a difference obviously. We’ll see what happens, but if that’s the situation, I would prefer to be white tomorrow.”

Caruana said he expects the final game to be a tough one. “What can I say, it’s going to be a tough game. At this point, the tension is sort of at its peak. If I knew what would happen, I would tell you.”

Sunday will be another rest day in London. Play will resume on Monday at 8:30 PM IST.</s>What term do you want to search? Search with google</s>Hello and welcome to today’s 11th game of the world chess championship between Norway’s Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana of the United States. Play resumes today after with the best-of-12-games match deadlocked at 5-all following 10 draws in as many games, no closer to a verdict than when we started. We have, however, borne witness to a bit of history: the longest streak of games to open a match without a decisive result in the recognized 132-year history of world championship matches.

A brief refresher on how we got here: Game 1 was a grueling seven-hour, 115-move staredown, where Carlsen nearly become the first defending champion to win the opening game of a world championship with the black pieces in 37 years. The next four contests – Game 2, Game 3, Game 4 and Game 5 – were mostly safer, straightforward affairs where Caruana was able to get his teeth in the match. The tension ramped up in Game 6 when Carlsen was outplayed by Caruana in the middlegame and pushed to the limit before saving a draw with incredibly precise defending. They played to another draw in Sunday’s Game 7, a result that left the champion lamenting his gun-shy play as white. In Monday’s Game 8, Carlsen found himself down nearly an hour on the clock facing a dangerous position as black, until one false step by the American allowed him to hold. It was Caruana’s turn to suffer in Game 9 until he was bailed out by a Carlsen inaccuracy. Then came Thursday’s Game 10, where Caruana found himself on the brink once more until Carlsen overextended himself and was made to “grovel” for a draw.

Ten games. Ten draws. Will today be the day that first blood is finally drawn? We’ll soon find out when Carlsen makes the first move as white at the top of the hour.</s>The penultimate scheduled contest of Magnus Carlsen’s world championship title defense against Fabiano Caruana fizzled out practically before liftoff on Saturday, ending in a simple two-and-a-quarter-hour draw to leave their best-of-12-games match knotted at 5½-all with one game remaining.

“I’m not thrilled, obviously,” the 27-year-old champion from Norway said. “I got surprised in the opening and just decided to shut it down. It wasn’t great but it’s no disaster. Now I’ve just got to play well in one more classical and see what happens.”

Carlsen, as white, played into Caruana’s Petroff with an opening line that paralleled their August meeting at the Sinquefield Cup, which ended in a draw. The American challenger and world No 2 was first to deviate, castling on the kingside (7. O-O) instead of the Nc6 he’d played in St Louis.

A briefly promising double-edge position took shape with (8. Qd2 Nd7 9. O-O-O Nf6 10. Bd3 c5), but Carlsen expended 23 minutes on his next two moves (11. Rhe1 Be6 12. Kb1 Qa5) and admitted he’d been thrown for a curve once more by Caruana’s exhaustively researched opening preparation and not for the first time during the fortnight. Eventually the champion offered up a queen exchange with 13. c4 and the ladies were off the board (13. ... Qxd2 14. Bxd2), abruptly stripping the tension from the affair.

“I wasn’t pleased from the opening and then after that I just wanted to play it safe,” Carlsen said. “I was trying to push a little bit, but it’s nothing real. In this match situation I thought there was no reason to go crazy.”

The action soon entered an opposite-colored bishop endgame which Caruana held with no problems before consenting to a 55-move draw after two hours and 13 minutes, the shortest game of the match so far.

The 11 straight draws represent the longest streak of games to open a match without a decisive result in the recognized 132-year history of world championship play. The previous mark was set during the 1995 match between Garry Kasparov and Viswanathan Anand, which started with eight consecutive draws before Kasparov broke through en route to a 10½-7½ victory.

The players will look forward to another rest day on Sunday before the competition resumes on Monday at the College in Holborn with Game 12, where a decisive result could lift the winner over the 6½-point threshold and decide an outright winner in the €1m ($1.14m) showdown.

“There’s a lot riding on the last game,” said the 26-year-old Caruana, who will play with the white pieces in a one-off that could make him only the second American-born player to capture the world championship after Bobby Fischer in 1972. “It will be very tense for both of us. I’m not going to go crazy or anything, of course, but I will try to put pressure on him.”

He added: “What can I say? It’s going to be a tough game. At this point the tension is sort of at its peak. If I knew what would happen I would tell you.”

Should Monday’s final classical game end in another bloodless result, Carlsen will be a prohibitive favorite in Wednesday’s tie-breaker, which consists of a series of games under tighter time controls. The Norwegian, who in addition to his No 1 ranking is the world’s top rated rapid player and top rated blitz player (compared to Caruana’s respective ratings of No 8 and No 16), is unbeaten in tie-breakers over the last 13 years.

“We’ll see what happens,” said Carlsen, who extended a career-high streak of 16 straight draws stretching back to last month’s European Club Cup in Porto Carras, Greece. “A lot depends on what (Caruana) wants to do. If he wants to shut it down then that’s fine by me, we’ll play rapid (on Wednesday).</s>With his last chance to command the white pieces in a regulation game in the World Chess Championship, defending champion Magnus Carlsen was unable to drum up any attacking chances. Game 11 — like the 10 that preceded it — ended in a draw. Carlsen’s challenger, Fabiano Caruana, defended admirably and the two are tied 5.5-5.5 with one regulation game to go.

Saturday’s game began with the Petroff Defense, Caruana’s favorite opening with the black pieces. Not surprisingly, this was familiar mental territory for the No. 1 and No. 2 players in the world. Within 90 seconds, they’d blitzed out their first 10 moves, arriving at the position below.

This specific choice of opening was interesting for two reasons. One, Sergey Karjakin, the 2016 championship challenger, won a game with the white pieces from this exact position in 2016, against the elite Indian grandmaster Pentala Harikrishna. Two, the infamous deleted video that appeared to show secret aspects of Caruana’s pre-match preparation once again reared its head. That video showed a laptop screen with a variation of the Petroff that included the move “9…Nf6.” And indeed, on his ninth move, Caruana moved his knight to the f6 square.

But little else was interesting on Saturday. That “leaked” variation led to nothing sharp from either player and the secretive preparation unleashed no interesting secrets.

Karjakin happened to be in attendance at the venue in London on Saturday, and he provided some early commentary for the viewers that has also become the mantric chant of this match: “It looks very drawish,” he said. He was right. The queens came off the board by the 14th move. Only a pair of bishops and some pawns remained by the 26th. Thirty fruitless moves later, Carlsen and Caruana shook hands.

This is what an uneventful world championship draw looks like at high speeds. Come for the Petroff, stay for the bishop dance.

“Not much really happened today,” Caruana said after the game, to a bit of uncomfortable laughter from the crowd.

While Caruana may have very briefly felt some unpleasantness in the middlegame, “he may suffer successfully,” said Sam Shankland, the U.S. national champion, on a Chess.com broadcast. (To suffer successfully — what a lovely idea.) And indeed Caruana did. Indeed we all have over these past two weeks. Here’s exactly how, according to the computer’s unblinking eye:

“Chess in its present form will die the death of the draw,” wrote Emanuel Lasker, a former world champion, nearly 100 years ago. Yet here we are! Draws “are ingrained in the fabric of the game, a part of chess theory and culture,” another former national champ, Joel Benjamin, wrote in 2006. “Grandmasters play the opening better and make fewer mistakes. Willpower alone cannot ensure a decisive result.”

There is an austere beauty in the equilibrium of draws that this match has reached: Two goliaths, pushing each other with all their might, yet moving nowhere. At any moment, though, the ground can shift.

The mounting draws bring both good and bad news for the American challenger. On one hand, Caruana has proved beyond a doubt his ability to hang with and even outplay Carlsen, perhaps the best player of all time, in lengthy games under the sport’s brightest lights. On the other, should the match remain tied after the final game, the two will move on to speedier tie-breaking games. I wrote about what those look like in 2016. Carlsen is rated No. 1 in the world in both speedy chess formats that will be used, and he is almost universally thought to be a heavy favorite in the tiebreaker.

The match rests tomorrow. Game 12 — the final game of regulation and in which Caruana will have the white pieces — begins Monday at 10 a.m. Eastern. The tie-breaking games, if necessary, will happen on Tuesday. I’ll be covering it all here and on Twitter.</s>Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana, the world’s top two grandmasters, spent Thanksgiving in London in a soundproof glass box, staring at a small table, guzzling bottled water and continuing their deadlocked battle for the World Chess Championship.

The match was already a record-breaker, having started with more consecutive draws than any championship on the books. As the holiday began, the best-of-12 race for the title sat level 4.5-4.5. Tensions ran high. #LooksDrawish was trending on Twitter (I assume/dream).

I awoke in my Brooklyn apartment early Thursday morning, put on some heavy-duty coffee and watched as the grandmasters opened Game 10 with another Sveshnikov Sicilian, just as they’d done in Game 8. Caruana steered out of Game 8’s lane on his 12th move, with a novel “pawn to b4,” and they were left with the position below.

“It’s going to be a complicated game,” said the grandmaster Judit Polgár, providing the official match commentary.

And indeed it was going to be — for the players and your humble chess correspondent. My parents were in town, my sister was sweating over an oven, and forgotten provisions had to be procured. A table had to be set. Mashed potatoes had to be eaten. I tore away from the match and headed into the city.

Having nervously missed a handful of moves on my train ride, I ascended from the serviceless subway station in time to witness something special from Carlsen, the defending world champion who had yet to do much special at all. One grandmaster told me his move was “phenomenal.” Another tweeted that it was “incredible.” A chess writer called it “sensational.” A chess instructor called it “fascinating.”

So just what was it that Carlsen did with the black pieces here?

It was pawn to b5.

Erwin l’Ami, the grandmaster who called it “incredible,” described the idea behind the move, which ostensibly loses a pawn for Carlsen, as follows: Once Carlsen pushes that pawn to b5, Caruana can win it by moving his pawn to b6. (That may not appear to be a legal move, but it’s a special capture known as en passant, in which a pawn can diagonally capture another pawn that has just hopped up two squares next to it.) Carlsen could then take the rook on a3 with his rook, and Caruana could take that rook with his knight. Carlsen could then push his pawn to f3, encroaching further into white’s territory. Two pawn captures then ensue on that same square, followed by Caruana capturing there with his bishop. And then Carlsen could bring his knight into the action on e5. The result of that hypothetical line would have looked like this — a “huge attack” on Caruana’s king.

After snacking nervously with this chess idea in our heads, my parents and I emerged from a serviceless restaurant worried (or at least I was) that we may have missed the final Norwegian triumph and the de facto end of the world championship. Someone may have won! We found instead that we hadn’t missed many moves and that Caruana hadn’t bit on Carlsen’s aggressive pawn sacrifice. No devastating attack had come. The position (my phone told me) was once again level. It looked drawish.

When we arrived at last at my sister’s apartment, her boyfriend already had both the chess game and the football game on large screens, thereby forever cementing his value to the family. He’s not much of a chess player, but he did have some interesting thoughts on rook endgames. Lucky thing, too, because by that point the game looked like this.

With my attention divided between how-to-carve-a-turkey videos on YouTube, a glass of Cabernet, and the soundproof glass box in London, I was nevertheless unsurprised to see Carlsen and Caruana shake hands for the 10th game in a row, agreeing to a draw on the 54th move. The match — needless to say — sits level at 5-5 with two games to go.

Brin-Jonathan Butler, a Canadian journalist who was therefore presumably unencumbered by Thanksgiving, had been keeping a close eye on the match and called me to say that it has been “as eventful as a bus keeping its schedule.” And indeed, that schedule continues: Game 11 begins Saturday at 3 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time — that’s 10 a.m. Eastern. I’ll be covering it here and on Twitter.
After eleven consecutive draws, a record for the 132-year-old championship, Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana are tied 5.5 points each in the best-of-12-games match.