Norway Chess 2021: Carlsen Wins Every Round, but Rapport Leads the Tournament at the Rest Day

Thanks to the funny scoring system used in the Norway Chess tournament, one can "win" every round but not win the tournament. The tournament is a classical round-robin, with a twist. If someone wins the classical game, they get three points while the loser gets zero. If, however, the classical game is drawn, the players each get a full point, and then play an Armageddon game with the same colors for an additional half a point. In other words, if A beats B in the classical game while C and D draw, with C winning the Armageddon game, the scores will look like this:

A 3
C 1.5
D 1
E 0

In this event, Carlsen has been C in every round. All four of his classical games have been drawn, and he has "won" all the Armageddon games, drawing those in which he had Black and winning those in which he played White. Carlsen thus has six points out of a maximum possible of 12.

Richard Rapport, meanwhile, has drawn two Armageddon games, once with White - against Carlsen - and once with Black (against Sergey Karjakin), receiving a total of 2.5 points from those two rounds. But he has two classical wins - against Aryan Tari in round one and Alireza Firouzja in round four - and those six additional points have him in clear first with 8.5 points.

Also ahead of Carlsen is his pending challenger, Ian Nepomniachtchi, who has seven points. In rounds 2 and 3 he defeated Firouzja and Tari in Armageddon to pick up 3 points, and after losing to Carlsen in the round 4 Armageddon game yesterday (1 more point) he made up his postponed round 1 game with Karjakin today with a convincing win in classical chess (3 points) to get to 7 points overall.

It's a double round-robin (six players, ten rounds), so there's a ways to go yet. Other scores: Karjakin has 4 points, and Firouzja and Tari are tied at the bottom with 3 points apiece.