Biel Rd.4: Carlsen wins again, 3015 performance

The 2011 Biel Chess Festival is taking 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 is of course the Accentus Grandmaster Tournament with six very strong grandmasters playing a double round robin: Magnus Carlsen, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Alexei Shirov, Fabiano Caruana, Alexander Morozevich and Yannick Pelletier.

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

The rate of play: 2 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 is three points for a win, one for a draw and zero for a loss. No draw offers are permitted before move 30.

Shirov and Vachier-Lagrave started out with a Keres Attack with an early 6.h3 before the classic g4 thrust, following theory for thirteen moves. Play was balanced, though not squeezed dry, however they preferred to not push the issue and repeated the position on move 21.

Carlsen played a great game against Caruana, and while it would be easy to just label it as a great ‘positional’ game, but it was a game that would have made Lasker or Korchnoi proud. The reason is that it was far more a psychological victory than pure chess. The Norwegian played his former mentor’s favorite Scotch, though truth be told, he had achieved little to nothing after nineteen moves other than a better pawn structure. He then opted for an inspired exchange sacrifice with 19.Nd4!?, which left the position balanced, but seriously changed the character of the battle. It was as much a positional choice as a psychological one in which his comfort zone was far greater than the Italian’s. One could argue that prior to Fabiano’s blunder 25…Re6?, no one had any big edge, but it is very likely that the circumstances played a big role in provoking the blunder in the first place.

Standings

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 Daniel King is doing round-up shows at 8:00 p.m. on the days he is commenting.

GM Daniel King commenting on the games in round one

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 2011 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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