Biel Rd1 - Giri beats Morozevich, and Hao beats Bacrot

The 2012 Biel Chess Festival is taking place from July 23rd to August 2nd, in a number of groups: the Master Tournament (eleven rounds Swiss); the Main Tournament (nine rounds Swiss); a Rapid and a Blitz tournament; Chess960; Youth, Simultaneous, Chess Tennis, ChessBase training seminars. Of greatest interest is of course the Accentus Grandmaster Tournament with six very strong grandmasters playing a double round robin: Magnus Carlsen, Hikaru Nakamura, Alex. Morozevich, Wang Hao, Etienne Bacrot and Anish Giri.

Hikaru Nakamura, Etienne Bacrot, Magnus Carlsen, Wang Hao, Anish Giri and Alex Morozevich

The rate of play: 40 moves in 100 minutes, then 20 moves in 50 minutes followed by 15 minutes for the rest of the game, with 30 sec increment per move. The scoring system is three points for a win, one for a draw and zero for a loss. No draw offers are permitted before move 30.

Round one

Much like one of those special double-billings at movie houses, chess players and fans are not being allowed a moment’s breath with the end of Dortmund on Sunday giving way to the first round of Biel on Monday. The lineup could hardly be sweeter with Magnus Carlsen returning to defend his title, accompanied by Hikaru Nakamura, Alexander Morozevich, top Chinese player Wang Hao, Etienne Bacrot, and prodigy Anish Giri.

Nakamura gives his opinion

In the first round, Carlsen was paired against Nakamura, and the Norwegian seemed to be weaving his special brand of magic as he tried to build up a minute advantage. The American buckled down and came up with a deep defensive idea that turned out to be sufficient to neutralize his opponent’s evil plans and they drew.

Hikaru Nakamura and Magnus Carlsen review their game. The post-game video analysis
can be seen live at Playchess right after the game's end.

Top-rated Chinese player Wang Hao completely steamrolled Etienne Bacrot after the latter took an ill-advised pawn after which his game fell apart.

Annotations by GM Alejandro Ramirez

Wang Hao analyzes his win over Etienne Bacrot

Finally, Alexander Morozevich and Anish Giri played an extremely complicated game which seemed to stay balanced, barring a tactical gaffe missed by both players on move 32. Listening to Anish Giri comment in the post-game analysis, and how completely mystified he was by his opponent’s moves throughout the game, it sounded as if they were playing different games that just so happened to take place on the same board. Sometime past the time control, it was clear that whatever the engine’s evals were, the Russian’s king was the one in danger, and under pressure he cracked and lost.

Anish Giri fires off analysis during the post-mortem

Anish Giri shares his understanding and confusion  

Pictures by Pascal Simon

Live GM commentary on Playchess

There is live audio and video commentary on the chess server Playchess. The English commentary starts at 3:30 p.m., and German commentary directly from the playing site begins at 4:00 p.m. In addition Yasser Seirawan is doing round-up shows at 8:00 p.m. on the days he is commenting.

Commentary schedule

As a special treat the multimedia commentary live from Biel is also available on our live browser coverage. This also includes the players analysing after their games.

• You can watch the live coverage of Biel 2012 in your browser here

Overview: schedule and results

Links Official tournament site All games in PGN The games are being broadcast live on the official web site and on the chess server Playchess.com. If you are not a member you can download a free Playchess client there and get immediate access. You can also use ChessBase 11 or any of our Fritz compatible chess programs.

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