Biel Rd.5: Vachier-Lagrave stops Carlsen, Morozevich wins

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.

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.

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.

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:

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

• Click to download all the analysis in PGN

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.

Copyright ChessBase