Tata R03: Carlsen, Anand, Karjakin score

75. Tata Steel Chess Tournament

This event is taking place from January 12-27. The venue is as usual the traditional De Moriaan Center in the Dutch sea resort of Wijk aan Zee,. The tournament has taken place since 1938 and was known as the Corus Chess Tournament. The Indian company Tata Steel bought Corus (for US $7.6 billion) in 2006 and the chess event way renamed accordingly. The tournament has three Grandmaster Groups, which have 14 players and are held as full round robins (each competitor plays against every other). The rate of play for all three groups is 100 minutes for 40 moves, then 50 minutes for 20 moves and finally 15 minutes for the rest of the game, with a 30 seconds/move increment starting with the first move of the game.

Round three report

The players seem to start warming up after a start of the tournament that featured too many draws. Some blood was finally spilled on the chess board today!

Magnus Carlsen opened up the day against the Dutch old-timer Loek van Wely. After the second player went for a dubious opening – "Maybe I mixed up the move order in the opening, and later I was trying to be tricky..." – he got into an endgame with a completely shattered structure. Rather than suffer for hours against the World Number 1 in a hopeless position, Loek decided resigning was in order.

The Chinese super star, Hou Yifan, played her first white today, but got less than nothing from the opening. Erwin L’Ami neutralized her completely and a boring draw ensued.

Leko-Nakamura also ended in a draw after some computer lines were repeated over the board, and although the theoreticians were licking their chops, probably none of the spectators were nearly as excited. You may be interested to watch their postgame analysis session here.

Ivan Sokolov vs Anish Giri (above) proved why the Grunfeld has been so successful in recent years. Mass exchanges left White up a pawn but with no activity, and the draw was very obvious to everybody.

A less obvious draw was Harikrishna-Aronian. After a boring opening Harikrishna decided to go for some hara kiri by not trading the rooks on the e-file. He was somewhat lucky to survive as Aronian seemed to be gradually improving his position.

The Indian fanbase did have a good reason to celebrate today, as the reigning World Champion took care of business and defeated Caruana in a stylish way. A positional dominance in the Spanish led to a surprising infiltration of White’s major pieces on the eighth rank. A blunder in move 34 allowed White’s attack to crash through, and Anand picked up a point.

Lastly, Wang Hao decided that his position was too good to give a draw, and ended up losing against Karjakin. Sometimes pushing too hard leads to bitter defeats, even at this level!

Summary by GM Alejandro Ramirez, screen shots from the official web site

The following annotation was sent to us from Wijk aan Zee by GM Efstratios Grivas:

Current standings

GM Danny King Play of the Day – Carlsen vs van Wely

And here is the animated analysis of the game by Kingscrusher Tryfon Gavriel

Replay all the games of the round on our JavaScript player

Results of the B and C Groups

Commentary schedule

There is full broadcast of all games on the official site and on the Playchess server, which will provide live audio commentary of the most interesting games (free for Premium members) starting at 15:00h for each round, 14:00h for the final round. Commentary begins at approx. 3 p.m. and lasts 2 to 2½ hours, with breaks in between. A round-up show is provided at 8 PM server time. Commentary is available, by the following experts:

Interviews with players after round three

Links Official tournament site All games in PGN: Group A – Group B – Group C 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 12 or any of our Fritz compatible chess programs.

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