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. This game was no exception. After Caruana took the exchange, the sting was out of the position. 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. We found instead that we hadn’t missed many moves and that Caruana hadn’t bit on Carlsen’s aggressive pawn sacrifice. 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. 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. 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. “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. 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. 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? Lucky thing, too, because by that point the game looked like this. 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.
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.