7/27/2011 – Last year the Biel Chess Festival was a somewhat lack-luster affair. This year,
in contrast, it is pure fireworks. Just three games in under 30 moves, as opposed
to 17 in 2010, and 48.6% draws vs 69% in the previous edition. We have some
theories why this is so. Also the post-game analysis on Playchess,
which can be watched by spectators all over the world. Enjoy.
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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.
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.
Round 7: Tuesday, July 26, 14:00h
Alex. Morozevich
1-0
Maxime Vachier
Alexei Shirov
0-1
Magnus Carlsen
Yannick Pelletier
0-1
Fabiano Caruana
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.
Alexander Morozevich at the start of round seven...
... and analysing with Vachier-Lagrav and Miso Cebalo on Playchess after
the game
Maxime Vachier-Lagrav understandably not so happy with the result
Magnus Carlsen analyses with Miso Cabalo after yet another successful round
Magnus enters the moves himself on the Playchess server...
... making some interesting points about the game (see video below)
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.
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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