@eniolw and @sawko are now leading head to head the Hivechess Candidates Tournament after 12 rounds

Hi chessfans,

yesterday rounds 9 to 12 of the HCT were played, and like on the first tournament day not a single game was missed! Chapeau to all the participants!
@vjap55 did here an analysis of his games and @schamangerbert streamed the event (i.e. selected games) on Twitch!

Results

^{* indicates a missed game}

Like previous Friday there was not a single draw, all games ended decisively whereby this time generally the favorites could succeed.

The cross-table, one round before everybody played everybody looks now like this:

Standings

After 12 rounds again the lead changed. Due to their perfect score of 4/4 despite some challenging opponents both @eniolw and @sawko could take the top spot with the same amount of points, and @vjap55 fell back to the 3^rd rank, 1,5 points behind. @jaki01 is currently 4^th with 8,5 points as well, but had played already 12 rounds, so @samostically in the next round will likely overtake him.

In the next round there will the match between the 2 current leaders, so this will be very important for the outcome of the tournament. If that is a draw, then actually both players would be totally equal, they would have even the same Sonneborn-Berger score (as they both lost once against the same player)! Fortunately there is another set of return games, so I hope there will emerge some differences. If not, either the first place is divided between both or there will be a play-off with 2 blitz games (and 2 bullet games if needed) played out. What would be your preference? An armageddon game you can´t do on Lichess as far as I know. Or decide by the number of games won with Black? Seems weird.

See you next Friday - and as always keep practicing!