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: two 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.

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.

After each game in Biel the players – above Magnus Carlsen and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave – come to the commentary stage and discuss the game that finished minutes before with the GM host (Miso Cebalo). The analysis is entered in Playchess, by the players themselves, with the screen projected for the audience present at the site. But it is also visible to Playchess Premium users in real time all over the world. The sessions include video and a ChessBase staff member – Pascal Simon – makes a capture for the ChessBase channel on YouTube. That is how we bring you the live commentary of the players.

Some day all top-notch chess games will be broadcast this way...

Was Maxime calling the shots in game eight? That is what most reports said.

"I got a small but pleasant advantage from the opening," Magnus Carlsen wrote in his blog. "After consolidating the queenside I was ready to utilize the extra space on the kingside. He chose an active defense with f5, g5 and g4 and managed to find good defensive moves, also after my doubling of rooks in the h-file. Beyond the first time control the position was equal, but eager to play for a win I went Qc1, ceding the initiative to Black, and had to play accurately myself afterwards. After Qd5 he offered a draw and I didn’t find a way to play on." Watch the very illuminating analysis session below – a PGN with all the lines is to be found at the end of this section.

A fateful game, Alexander Morozevich vs Fabiano Caruana. The 0-1 result dashed
the hopes of the Russian GM and guaranteed Carlsen's victory in this tournament

Yannick Pelletier and Alexei Shirov clearly enjoying their postgame session

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.

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

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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