Norway Chess begins

As the tournament banner on the website of the Altibox Norway Chess tournament indicates Magnus Carlsen is the center of attention and favorite to win the event. But the field is strong. Five of the ten participants are currently top ten players, nine of the participants are among the top twenty and only wild card GM Niels Grandelius from Sweden who won the Norway Chess Qualifier has less than 2700 elo.

List of participants

Looking back...

Favorite and World Champion or not, in the three previous editions of the tournament Carlsen always had trouble on home-turf. In 2013 he finished second behind Sergey Karjakin...

Norway Chess 2013

...and 2014 was not much different:

Norway Chess 2014

In 2015 Karjakin did not play but things did not improve for Carlsen. lAfter losing on time in a winning position against Veselin Topalov in round 1 because he was not aware of the time-limit Carlsen could not fully recover and finished seventh with 3.5/9 - and of his worst results in years.

Norway Chess 2015

But Carlsen seems to be in splendid shape again. In December 2015 he won the Qatar Open in Doha convincingly. Soon after he celebrated the start of 2016 with his fifth win of the Tata Steel tournament in Wijk in Zee. The question is whether the World Champion will be able to show the same form in Norway, at home. The next days will tell.

Schedule of the Altibox Norway Chess tournament 2016

All ordinary rounds start at 4pm CET

There will be a blitz match and rapid chess Friday April 29 after Round 9 if two players share first place.
If there are more than 2 players sharing first place a new match will take place Saturday 30.  

Live Broadcast

Watch it live on Playchess!

When the games are running, clicking on the above link will take you to our live broadcast. It is free and open to all – as a Premium Account member you have access to the Live Book, Chat, chess engine analysis – all in your browser, on a notebook, tablet or even your smartphone. And the Let's Check function will show you what the most powerful computers in the world think of the current position, as each move is being played.

In the live broadcast below, on the side of each board is an evaluation meter, showing you which side is better. The small "x" button on the top right of each board will remove it from the broadcast. If you remove two games you will have four larger boards. Removing four will give you two even larger boards, and removing five will give you just one very large board. Refresh the page (Ctrl-R) to return to the six most popular boards.

You can also click the "+" and "–" icons at the bottom right of the broadcast window to increase and decrease the number of boards. There are other functions: you can download PGNs of the running games and even start an engine by clicking the robot button (third from left). Note that you can view moves and statistics in the opening (with the Live Book switched on) and even analyse on the boards while the games are being broadcast, by moving pieces and using the engine – best in multiple line mode. Is there a better way to follow the games?

Commentary schedule on playchess.com

Links Official tournament site You can use ChessBase 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.