Grand Chess Tour - Leuven Express: Magnus Carlsen catches up leader

by ChessBase
7/1/2017 – With Wesley So winning the Rapid game phase, opening up a two-point edge over Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, and a three-point lead over Magnus Carlsen, the question was whether they might catch up with him in the blitz phase. The World Champion answered in emphatic fashion as he blew away the field with 7.5/9 on day one of the blitz phase, and already caught up with So in the combined scores. Express report.

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The Leuven tournament of the Grand Chess Tour is running from June 28 to July 2 in Leuven, Belgium. It is a combination of Rapid and Blitz games. The ten participants are Magnus Carlsen, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Viswanathan Anand, Wesley So, Ian Nepomniachtchi, Levon Aronian, Vladimir Kramnik, Anish Giri, Vassily Ivanchuk, and Baadur Jobava. They will play nine rapid games, three a day, from June 28–30. Each day the games will start at 14:00h, 15:30h and 17:00h European Standard Summer Time. The Blitz tournament is on July 1-2, with nine rounds on each day, starting at 14:00h. The total prize fund is $150,000!

Note that the event is using the Bronstein mode: the players have 25 minutes for all the moves of a rapid game, and a ten second delay per move. This means that the clock does not run for ten seconds – the point is that you cannot accumulate time by playing very quickly in the Bronstein Mode.

Day four

Full report with grandmaster analysis to follow...

Replay blitz games

 

Of particular interest in our Live Broadcast screen above (maximize for full enjoyment) is that the games of the round have been analysed and annotated by a very powerful computer – in real time. The machine analysis included didactic opening notes, tactical analysis, threats, better lines – all given in natural language.

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At the bottom of the notation window on the right there is an evaluation bar which indicates how the game went for the two players. You can simply click on the bar to jump to the position where things came to a head. There are also buttons for editing (delete, promote, cut lines, unannotate, undo, redo) save, play out the position against Fritz or tweet it to others. Hovering the mouse over any button will show you its function. The Live Book section shows you the moves that have been played in the current position, by what level of players and with what results. The Live Book is the most comprehensive and up-to-date openings key in the world.

You can maximize the replayer, auto-play, flip the board and even change the piece style in the bar below the board. You can access the live games at any time during the round. To the right of our news page you have the live tournament navigation.

Blitz crosstable after nine rounds

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Links

You can use ChessBase 14 or any of our Fritz compatible chess programs to replay the games in PGN. You can also download our free Playchess client, which will in addition give you immediate access to the chess server Playchess.com.


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