This one's my own read of the games, not reporting on someone else's article. I'm not a titled player myself, I lean on Stockfish to help me see what actually happened over the board, and I'll flag it clearly whenever a piece is mine like this.
The 6th Wood Green Invitational ran across nine rounds at Oddfellows Hall in Stafford, a ten-player round robin with a genuinely stacked field, headlined by England legend GM Michael Adams (2622), who ended up a quiet mid-table 4.5/9. The tournament belonged to top seed GM Shreyas Royal instead, 7 points out of 9, half a point clear of GM Alexander Kovchan, a full point clear of IM Jonah Willow in third.
Royal opened with five straight wins, Fava, Mahadevan, Shearsby, Vijayakumar, Banerjee, including a sharp kingside pawn-storm finish against Shearsby that ended in a forced mate net. Good start on paper. Less good if you look at what the engine flagged underneath it.
In three of those five wins, Royal himself let a clearly winning position slip back to roughly equal, missing Bg6 against Mahadevan, missing Qf5 and then Rxe5 in the same game against Vijayakumar, missing Rb5 against Banerjee. Every single time, his opponent handed the advantage straight back with a blunder of their own a few moves later. Five wins on the board, a much shakier run underneath it.
Round 6 is where it caught up with him. Against Willow, Royal missed Bxf5, then missed Bxd3 a few moves after that, and this time nobody blundered it back. His only loss of the tournament.
He answered immediately with a clean, mistake-free win over Badacsonyi in round 7, ground out over a long rook endgame with nothing flagged either side. Then closed out with two low-key draws, a quiet technical draw against Adams in round 8, and a nine-move theoretical draw against Kovchan in round 9 that both players were plainly happy to take, enough to seal first outright without needing to risk a thing.
Full standings, crosstable, and every game are on Chess-Results and the Lichess broadcast.
A free puzzle book pulling the sharpest moments from this event, including the swings Royal himself let slip, is now available. See if you can find the moves that were missed before checking the answer. Download it here.