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, 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: 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.

Standings...

The special scoring system in Biel (three points for a win, one for a draw) yields the following table:

The traditional method of scoring (1 - ½ - 0) produced exactly the same rankings:

However, the dynamics are different: if Magnus were to draw in the next round and Morozevich would win, then the Russian would have caught his Norwegian counterpart in the traditional table, but would be a point behind in the Biel system.

... statistics

Now let us look at draw quotients. Last year we complained about the luke-warm play of the young masters (much to the chagrin of the organisers); this year we are witnessing one of the most exciting, hard-fought games of the year. Let us compare the statistics for this year (so far) and 2010:

Number of games White wins Draws Black wins

2011 21 28.6% 47.6% 23.8%

2010 45 20.0% 68.9% 11.1%

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 so far, with slightly less than half the number of games played, there have been zero games of less than 23 moves, and just three with less than 30 moves (including a win by Carlsen over Caruana in 27 moves). Possible conclusions: odd years produce more exciting chess, or it has something to do with global warming, or it is critical to invite the right mix or players.

... and 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 is appropriately named Live Chess Ratings and is updated regularly, often minutes after each game in a tournament is completed. Yesterday, 26 July 2011, at 18:26 GMT, the ratings of the top twenty players in the world were as follows:

We draw your attention to the fact that on Friday, July 22, Magnus Carlsen had reached his highest ever rating of 2828.4 (in July and September 2010 he was 2826), the second highest rating of any human chess player ever. But he still has a bit to go to reach the mystical 2851 set up by one Garry Kimovich in July 1999 and January 2000.

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.

... and analysing with Vachier-Lagrav and Miso Cebalo on Playchess after the game

Magnus Carlsen analyses with Miso Cabalo after yet another successful round

... making some interesting points about the game (see video below)

• Click here to download the analysis of the players in PGN

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.

GM Jan Gustafsson doing live audio commentary on Playchess in English

Directly from the playing venue: GM Miso Cebalo with live commentary in German

As a special treat the multimedia commentary live from Biel is also available in 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

Commentary schedule

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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