After he found g6, he found a series of only moves to maintain parity. Van Foreest, who had won two of his last three games here, kept setting more landmines in the hope of winning but the German was upto it. “All the trouble that was caused were purely caused by myself, but yeah, it was certainly the most dangerous moment,” he added.

But those few minutes — he had to make five only moves in seven in the endgame to keep the game level — was, in a microcosm, his tournament. Outside of the first game against Nihal Sarin where he had an accuracy of 84.8% (Sarin’s was below 82%), his accuracy has been hovering 94% or over. At a super tournament where there’s no second time control, that’s very impressive. “I felt good here,” he said. “I managed to get good sleep. The preparation was nice, and also worked out nicely. And of course, it’s important to have a good start, because once you have a good start, you get a good feeling. Things are just happening more naturally, which is especially important in a shorter time control, because then you can rely more on intuition and save some time there, which usually matters in the end.”

What kind of player is he? He relies more on intuition — from that standpoint, more Magnus Carlsen than Gukesh — a point Anish Giri made. It’s something Keymer himself had said before the tournament began. “I think we are quite different chess players,” the 20-year-old had said. “So, what works for him doesn’t necessarily work for me. But, of course, it’s interesting to see a different perspective on chess and I do believe that I saw some things which I could use for my own purposes as well, yeah.”