The 2011 Biel Chess Festival took place from July 16 to 29, 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 was of course the Accentus Grandmaster Tournament with six very strong grandmasters playing a double round robin: Magnus Carlsen, Maximee Vachier-Lagrave, Alexei Shirov, Fabiano Caruana, Alexander Morozevich and Yannick Pelletier.

The participants: Caruana, Pelletier, Shirov, Carlsen, Morozevich, Vachier-Lagrave

The rate of play: two hours for 40 moves, then one hour for 20 and 15 min for the rest of the game, with 30 sec increment per move. The scoring system was three points for a win, one for a draw and zero for a loss. No draw offers were permitted before move 30.

The tournament winner was (once again) Norwegian GM Magnus Carlsen, who won five games and lost one ("plus four"), followed by Russian GM Alexander Morozevich with four wins and a loss (plus three), and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, who scored 50%, with two wins and two losses (both to Morozevich).

Final standings

Scoring system: a win counts as three points, a draw as one and a loss zero. In the traditional scoring system, which we assume will apply when calculating the ratings, the tournament table at halftime would look like this:

Note that the traditional method of scoring (1-½-0) produces exactly the same rankings, just different final scores.

Statistics

Let us look once again at the draw quotients, and compare them with last year's edition of the event:

Number of games White wins Draws Black wins

2011 30 23.3% 50.0% 26.7%

2010 45 20.0% 68.9% 11.1%

It is interesting to see that more games were won with the black pieces than with white – eight vs seven to be precise. Carlsen and Caruana won two games each with black, Morozevich three. Caruana lost two games with white, Pelletier three. Carlsen won three games with white, Vachier-Lagrave two.

And if you look at the lengths of the games you also see a marked difference: in 2010 there were six games of less than 23 moves, and a total of 17 games of less than 30 moves (16 draws and one black win). This year with a third less games (thirty games as opposed to last year's 45) there was just one game with less than 23 moves (Vachier-Lagrave vs Shirov in the final round), and just four with less than 30 moves (including a win by Carlsen over Caruana in 27 moves). A real difference that needs to be studied.

Live ratings

Finally let us take a look at the current live ratings, as calculated by a site run by IM Artiom Tsepotan together with International Arbiter Dr. Christopher Wright. It was calculated on 29 July 2011, at 19:13 GMT, and included the Biel tournament as well as eight rounds of the Dortmund event. The ratings of the top twenty players in the world are as follows:

Magnus Carlsen's highest ever live rating, 2828.4 on Friday, July 22 (after round four of Biel), has settled at 2823, making him the second highest rated player of all time. Only Garry Kasparov surpasses Magnus' rating with his mystical 2851, achieved in the July 1999 and January 2000 FIDE ratings.

Live GM commentary and interviews on Playchess

During the games of the Biel Chess Festival there was live commentary – by GM Miso Cebalo in German and GMs like Danny King, Jan Gustafsson or Jan Smeets in English. After the games were over the players came to the stage where Cebalo analysed the moves with them (in English). These were particularly interesting sessions, since the proponents had everything still fresh in their minds, and were in fact exploring, in real time, what had happened just minutes ago. All of this was available to a world-wide audience on Playchess and, with a normal Internet browser, on our special Chesslive broadcast page. In this report we show you the postgame interviews of the final round as video captures. At the end of the report you will find a PGN file to download and analyse yourself, assisted by your favourite chess engine.

• Click to download the analysis of the players in PGN

Our thanks for this splendid event and the productive cooperation go to...

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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