The Basel Chess Festival is taking place from January 1st to 5th as a seven-round Swiss tournament, with top seeds Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Boris Grachev, Edouard Romain and a host of strong GMs in a field totalling 89 players (197 in all groups).

The playing hall in Basel

The top four games are being broadcast live on the official web site and on Playchess

Standing after three rounds

Here are some interesting top games from the first three rounds to play through:

And here are some fun tactical shots from the tournament. Click on the diagram in the notation to jump to the critical position. Note that you can download the PGN file our Javascript player is showing and load it with Fritz (or Rybka, or Houdini) and analyse the positions marked as diagrams. It is quite a lot of fun, really, and we urge you to try it.

Player portraits

1.	Grachev,Boris	GM	2688	RUS	+3	=0	–0	3.0

2.	Vajda,Levente	GM	2603	ROU	+3	=0	–0	3.0

5.	Vorotnikov,Vladis	GM	2464	RUS	+2	=1	–0	2.5

7.	Vachier-Lagrave,M	GM	2711	FRA	2	1	0	2.5

8.	Gavrilov,Alexei	GM	2501	RUS	+2	=1	–0	2.5

10.	Van Kampen,R.	GM	2581	NED	+2	=1	–0	2.5

14.	Melkumyan,Hrant	GM	2656	ARM	+2	=1	–0	2.5

15.	Edouard,Romain	GM	2686	FRA	+2	=1	–0	2.5

Links Official tournament site (plus computer "translation") 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 12 or any of our Fritz compatible chess programs.

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