Bengaluru: Eight rounds into the Candidates tournament and 20-year-old Javokhir Sindarov is unbeaten, lounging comfortably with a two-point lead. Fabiano Caruana, who was in hot pursuit, tripped up in Round 8 with the Black pieces, losing to Hikaru Nakamura. It’s the first win of the tournament for the world No.2 American. One that’s put Caruana’s hopes of fighting for first place (he needed a win to close the gap with Sindarov to one point) in an all-or-nothing tournament like this one, off balance.

Caruana is now joined in second place by Anish Giri, who avenged his Round 1 defeat to R Praggnanandhaa.

The only Indian to win on Tuesday was Divya Deshmukh. She took down tournament leader and former women’s world champion Anna Muzychuk in a stunning turn of events, in what turned out to be the latter’s first loss in this competition.

Divya, playing with the Black pieces, was in hot water for the greater part of the game but went on to win in an inexplicable fashion. In a winning endgame, Anna made the terrible call of giving up her a7 pawn (59.a7??). White’s passed pawn on a6 was its most prized piece against Black’s most potent threat which Muzychuk seemed to give up for nothing, handing Divya a win on a platter.

The Women’s Candidates seems a lot more open and interesting than earlier with five players at 4.5 points and no one in the clear lead. Vaishali and Divya are both part of this group.

In the Open section, playing with the Black pieces, Praggnanandhaa seemed to have equalised before he made a couple of poor choices – moving his queen to the kingside (35. Qf7) and advancing his kingside pawn (38.h5). Giri pushed the e-pawn (40.e7) and Praggnanandhaa was already down to 40 seconds with no possibly good choices in an awful position. Praggnanandhaa is too far out of the race for first place now and an all-Indian World Championship will have to wait its turn after all.

Giri seems to have picked up pace in the tournament, having stopped Sindarov’s winning run a few days ago. He spoke of his ritual of watching stand-up comedy before the games at this Candidates and chose to make an exception to watch five minutes of the newly-released Netflix documentary on the Carlsen-Niemann saga on Tuesday.

As their game neared its obvious outcome, Praggnanandhaa, certain that Anish had a winning endgame in the bag, swivelled away from the board briefly, to look at the screen behind him and catch how the rest of the games were progressing. His sister R Vaishali drew with the Black pieces against Bibisara Assaubayeva. With six rounds still to go, she remains in the hunt for first place.

Earlier in the day, internet stumbled upon Sindarov’s preparation on the Lichess platform. Sindarov was nonchalant about it, terming it “not a big deal”. He said it wasn’t anything he’d worked on recently. Preparation leaks have been quite the constant for a while now. During his 2018 World Championship match against Magnus Carlsen, a two-minute clip from one of Caruana’s training camps was uploaded on YouTube, and the footage showed the list of openings that were being worked on along with the names of three Grandmasters who were his seconds.

In the 2023 championship, Ding Liren’s opening preparation was found by a user in the Lichess database. It had the exact position from Game 8, played between two random accounts a month before the match. It turned out those were secret training accounts of Ding and his second, Richard Rapport.

“I don’t remember the last time I opened the Lichess studies,” Sindarov said, “It should be a long time ago. During the World Cup, one of my friends was telling me, ‘Hey man your studies are not private’. I was shocked because in that moment I was checking some lines before games. In general, I try to be careful. But sometimes I forget to click twice to make it private. Everyone needs to learn to be careful.”

Sindarov and Andrey Esipenko were the first players to call it a night on Tuesday with a quick 22-move draw. Right before their game, the Uzbek and Russian – both football fans, were delighted to have Brazilian footballer David Luis at their board, making the ceremonial first move. “I’m a big fan. I’ve watched a lot of his games,” Sindarov beamed. “So, when they said his name both me and Andrey were wondering if it’s David Luis the footballer or some local guy. We were really happy to see him.” Luis plays for the Cypriot first division club, Pafos.