7/23/2011 – Magnus Carlsen's stratospheric cruise over the tournament in Biel was brought to a crashing stop by French GM Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, who showed remarkable perspicacity and patience in grinding down the world's number one in 96 moves. Alexander Morozevich refuted the "rule of the fist" and beat Fabiano Caruana to close up to the tournament leader. Full report with postgame interviews.
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Winning starts with what you know The new version 18 offers completely new possibilities for chess training and analysis: playing style analysis, search for strategic themes, access to 6 billion Lichess games, player preparation by matching Lichess games, download Chess.com games with built-in API, built-in cloud engine and much more.
Biel 2024 Chess Festival with analyses by Le Quang Liem, Donchenko, Bjerre and others. Sokolov, King and Zwirs show new opening ideas in the video. 10 repertoire articles from the Dutch to King's Indian and much more.
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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.
Round 5: Saturday, July 23, 14:00h
Maxime Vachier
1-0
Magnus Carlsen
Fabiano Caruana
½-½
Alex. Morozevich
Yannick Pelletier
0-1
Alexei Shirov
A computer he is not. We knew this last year when Magnus Carlsen suffered from
strange losses, but when he is in form you only expect to hear alternating tales
of his wonderful wins and the inevitable draws. Frenchman Maxime Vachier-Lagrave,
who had hoped to leave a more lasting mark than just his name in the crosstable,
has already done just that by soundly beating Carlsen while the latter was high
in the stratosphere above planet chess. Carlsen was Black in a Sicilian Rossolimo,
and the game took on a very closed character, with a giant crater on d5 but
all the pawns and heavy pieces on the board. Whether or not it could have been
defended will be up to the analysts to determine, but if it could, the world
number one failed to find how. Though the game took nearly 100 moves, Maxime
slowly crept forward, working not one, not two, but three weaknesses while Magnus
tried to patch the holes of his sinking ship. In the end, the Titanic could
not be saved.
Every rule has its exceptions and Alexander Morozevich showed
Fabiano Caruana just such a case. The rule isn’t one you will find in
books on strategy, but there is a popular chess adage called the ‘rule
of the fist’ which says that if a single player has a cluster of pieces
tight enough to occupy the space of a fist, usually four or more pieces, he
is in big trouble. After fourteen moves, Morozevich had exactly that but it
was his opponent who was in big trouble. After benefiting from a gift from
Vachier-Lagrave in round two, and so far unable to show the form that had
led him to crush the Russian Championship Higher League, this was his best
performance. Even though his advantage seemed to be in danger of disappearing,
it never quite did, and he pushed forward to a fine win in 52 moves moving
to clear second.
Swiss grandmaster Yannick Pelletier has to be pleased with at
least one thing: despite being the bottom of the tournament ranking list he
is not last by any margin. It is not uncommon for local players, benefiting
from a chance to gain experience against the elite to find the process to be
as brutal as instructive. The lessons are learned, but at the cost of any chess
ego they had prior, but here he has managed very well against such a hard field,
and in his game against Shirov, he was never in any danger as he held the draw.
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:
Live GM commentary and interviews on Playchess
During the games of the Biel Chess Festival there is live commentary –
by GM Miso Cebalo in German and GMs like Danny King, Jan Gustafsson or Jan Smeets
in English. After the games are over the players come to the stage where Cebalo
analyses the moves with them (in English). These are particularly interesting
sessions, since the proponents have everything still fresh in their minds, and
are in fact exploring, in real time, what happened just minutes ago.
All this is 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 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.
Opened up the tournament by beating Carlsen: French GM Maxime Vachier-Lagrave
Hard on Carlsen's heels: Russian GM Alexander Morozevich
Swiss GM Yannick Pelletier and Spanish GM Alexei Shirov analysing in Playchess
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.
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.
2nd Move Anti-Sicilian Powerbase 2025 is a database and contains a total of 12090 games from Mega 2025 or the Correspondence Database 2024, of which 874 are annotated.
Ruy Lopez Powerbase 2025 is a database and contains a total of 12092 games from Mega 2025 and the Correspondence Database 2024, of which 1276 are annotated.
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