Tomorrow the world chess championship will be decided in London by a succession of games played at increasingly fast time limits It's an unsatisfactory to decide the game's ultimate honour - rather like deciding a drawn Ashes series with a Twenty20 game.And there have been several problems with the match between the reigning champion, Norway's Magnus Carlsen, and his challenger, Fabiano Caruana from the United States.Carlsen has seemed out of sorts, particularly after failing to convert a favourable position in the first game. • If the score is still tied after those four games, they’ll play a mini-match of two blitz games, in which each player gets five minutes plus three bonus seconds after each move. Caruana’s preparation vs. Carlsen’s uncanny ability to find the right responses, even when he’s in trouble

In the competitive championship games, we’ve seen Carlsen repeatedly caught in Caruana’s superior opening preparation but able to find the best moves to equalize. “It looks like black is having all the fun in the position,” the grandmaster Robert Hess said after Caruana’s 21st move. Despite outplaying his opponent from the Black side of a Sicilian Sveshnikov Defense, Carlsen missed a number of opportunities to sharpen the play, with many grandmasters and computer programs saying Black could have obtained a strong initiative with the aggressive 25…exf4 26. In the final game he offered the draw that took the game into a fast play off rather than press for victory in another good position.All 12 games in the match were drawn, which was disappointing for the chess enthusiasts watching around the world.
After twelve consecutive draws, Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana will enter a tie-breaker on Wednesday, for the first match in WCC history to have no decisive games before the tie-breaker.