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 ten

The final round lived up to the promise of drama, with hours of nail-biting for both the players and the spectators.The reason is that the order of events maximized this effect.

Anish Giri has added 35 Elo in the last month

The first game to end was the decisive game between Wang Hao and Anish Giri. In a sense it was almost anti-climatic with the Chinese player achieving a small pull, though nothing close to decisive, when Giri played a careless 24…e6? That was punished immediately, leaving him with a lost game which ended on move 32. This temporarily placed Wang Hao in the lead, whilst awaiting for Magnus Carlsen’s result.

Anish Giri and Wang Hao analyze their game  

Wang Hao scored the biggest win of his life and is the first Chinese player to win an
international Super GM tournament.

As an aside, a number of readers will have noticed the rather odd presence of the Canadian flag next to Wang Hao’s name in the crosstables in the express report:

I had no idea that Wang Hao was Canadian!
Sam (Toronto, Canada)

I didn't know Wang Hao was Canadian!
Graham Ferrier (Toronto, Canada)

You assigned Hao the Canadian flag.
Plapp, N (Lemon Grove)

Obviously we did not ‘assign’ the Canadian flag to the Chinese player. The ChssBase program saw Wang Hao and decided he was in fact Wang Hao Yuan, who plays in Canada, and unfortunately we failed to catch this. Our thanks to the eagle-eye readers who caught this.

Magnus Carlsen tried his best to beat Etienne Bacrot, but the Frenchman held

At this point, it seemed very much like Carlsen was not going to be able to get anything from Etienne Bacrot, who was holding on with great tenacity and avoiding the Norwegian’s attempts to lead him astray. A draw was on the horizon. Then a mistake took place and Carlsen was on the offensive. It was precisely the sort of position he loves to milk: a n endgame with a nice advantage, that few, if any, can play as well. If he managed to win, the title was his, if not, Wang Hao was champion. Ultimately, only he (or our resident endgame expert Karsten Mueller) can say whether he might have forced a win, but whatever the result of this analysis, he did not.

Etienne Bacrot and Magnus Carlsen review the main moments of their game  

Hikaru Nakamura passed Anand on the list and is world 6th with 2783

The third game was also not without impact, as Hikaru Nakamura overcame Viktor Bologan, allowing him to join Anish Giri in 3rd-4th and share bronze.

Hikaru Nakamura analyzes his game with live commentator Klaus Bischoff  

The victory of Wang Hao in Biel is of great importance, since he is the first Chinese player to win outright a Super GM tournament. In fact, he was more successful than his namesake, Wang Hao, world-famous table tennis player, who played in the 2012 Olympic men’s finals the very same day, and came out second for silver.

The Biel participants: Wang Hao, Hikaru Nakamura, Anish Giri, Viktor Bologan,
Magnus Carlsen, and Etienne Bacrot.

The win has produced a bit of controversy, not because of any suspected foulplay, but the difference between the traditional scoring and the three-point scoring. Per traditional scoring, Magnus Carlsen would have won outright with 7.0/10 as opposed to Wang Hao’s 6.5/10, but under the three-point system, which rewards wins Wang Hao’s six wins gave him the clear gold with 19 points over Carlsen’s 18. Some readers felt this invalidated the value of the ‘soccer’ scoring system.

I have nothing against Wang Hao: he is a great player. But to be the winner at Biel is absurd after losing to Magnus twice. It just emphasizes the nonsense of the 3 for a win 1 for a draw rule. Sooner or later the chess world will understand that draws are ok. Some of the draws at Biel were more exciting than the decisive games. In my opinion Magnus won Biel.
Nick McGeat (Petaluma, CA, USA)

Karpov has long ago made clear the stupidity of the 3-1-0 points system. Take a nine-round tournament: one who wins three games and loses six games gets the same amount of points as the one who scores nine draws. Well, one more proof with Biel 2012.
Michko (Saint-Maur, France)

There is no clear cut answer however. The purpose of the system is much like a number of rules designed to reduce the number of draws, and keep the chess hard-fought and dynamic. Alternatives such as the Sofia rules are no different but are less successful. Players have come to realize that they can get around the 30-40 move limitation by repeating the position, and sure enough, in the last years, the number of draws by repetition under 30 moves has increased disproportionately. The three-point system provides extra incentive for a player to take chances and play for a win. This means that players wishing to maximize their tournament winning chances need to take this into account, and make small adjustments (or large) in their openings strategy and over-the-board decision-making. If you watch Wang Hao’s post-game analysis in round eight, it is clear he consciously chose lines that avoided a safe direction.

The winners of the Master tournament: Sergey Movsesian (silver), Igor Kurnosov (gold),
and Romain Edouard (bronze).

The Master tournament, an eleven-round swiss open with over 30 grandmasters, was led for a long time by French GM Romain Edouard, however in the final two rounds he was caught first by top-seed Sergey Movsesian, and in the last round by Igor Kurnosov whose tiebreak beat both.

Traditional standings after ten rounds

Three-point standings after ten rounds

Pictures by Pascal Simon

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.

Copyright ChessBase