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75th Tata Steel Chess Tournament
This event is taking place from January 12-27. The venue is as usual the traditional
De Moriaan Center in the Dutch sea resort of Wijk aan Zee. The tournament has
three Grandmaster Groups, which have 14 players and are held as full round robins
(each competitor plays against every other). The rate of play for all three
groups is 100 minutes for 40 moves, then 50 minutes for 20 moves and finally
15 minutes for the rest of the game, with a 30 seconds/move increment starting
with the first move of the game.
Final round preview
These are the standings after eleven rounds of play:
It is clear that nobody can catch Magnus, who has already won the A Group of
the 75th Tata Steel Chess Tournament. The only real question left open is who
will take second and third: Anand and Aronia are top contenders, since they
are a full point ahead of their nearest rivals (Leko and Karjakin). Both have
opponents from the bottom half of the score table in the final round, as does
Sergey Karjakin – barely. Peter Leko has white against Hou Yifan, but
given the Chinese GM's propensity for black in this event that may not be such
a big advantage. Here are the full pairings for the final round:
| Group A: Round 13 - Sunday January 27 |
| Sergey Karjakin - Loek van Wely |
|
| Hou Yifan - Peter Leko |
|
| Erwin L'Ami - Ivan Sokolov |
|
| Wang Hao - Vishy Anand |
|
| Hikaru Nakamura - Pentala Harikrishna |
|
| Anish Giri - Magnus Carlsen |
|
| Fabiano Caruana - Levon Aronian |
|
We turn to the other two groups. In the B Section everything is wide open:
three players are tied for first, and all three have relatively weak or out-of-form
opponents.
Arkadij Naiditsch and Sergei Movsesian face the two tail-enders Sipke Ernst
and Alexander Ipatov respectively – Naiditsch in fact has white. 16-year-old
GM Richárd Rapport has black against the experienced Predrag Nikolic,
hwo has has a bad tournament with six losses so far. Here are all the pairings
for the last round:
| Group B: Round 13 - Sunday January 27 |
| Daniil Dubov - Robin van Kampen |
|
| Jan Smeets - Maxim Turov |
|
| Nils Grandelius - Sergey Tiviakov |
|
| Alexander Ipatov - Sergei Movsesian |
|
| Arkadij Naiditsch - Sipke Ernst |
|
| Jan Timman - Romain Edouard |
|
| Predrag Nikolic - Richard Rapport |
|
In the C Group GMs Sabino Brunello from Italy and Fernando Peralta from Argentina
are tied for first and 2½ points ahead of the rest of the field. They
will decide Gold and Silver by themselves.
Both contenders for overall victory have the black pieces in the final round,
Fernando Peralta has the stronger opponent. The two girls are unhappily at the
bottom of the table, and both face 2500+ opponents in the final round. IM Mark
van der Werf, the only player they can overtake, has to play GM Krikor Mekhitarian
of Brazil, rated 2543, but has the white pieces.
| Group C: Round 13 - Sunday January 27 |
| Hjorvar Gretarsson - Alexandra Goryachkina |
|
| Mark van der Werf - Krikor Mekhitarian |
|
| Twan Burg - Igor Bitensky |
|
| Oleg Romanishin - Lisa Schut |
|
| Miguoel Admiraal - Sabino Brunello |
|
| David Klein - Robin Swinkels |
|
| Alexander Kovchan - Fernando Peralta |
|
Commentary schedule
The final round of live commentary will be delivered by GM Daniel King. Note
that since the games start at 12:00 noon the commentary will also be an hour
and a half earlier than usual – so stand by around 1:00 p.m. to listen
to Danny's take on the action.
Guess a move on Playchess
There is a new function on the Playchess server that you may like to try out
in this final round. If you have updated to the latest Playchess client (see
below) you might have noticed that there is a new button in the ribbon on top
of the "Home" screen:
When you are following a live game, and only then, this button is active.
Clicking on "Guess a Move" in the current position of a live game
produces a list of all legal moves:
You can choose a move and vote on it, i.e. predict what the player will do
next. Note also that you can win ducats by guessing a certain number of moves
right. The Jackpot is displayed in the Guess-a-Move window and may be different
for different games. The comma is a European decimal point, i.e. 40,00 Ducats
is forty Ducats, not 4000.
Note that you can be watching a number of games and make predictions for all
of them. Playchess allows you to load multiple games, and clicking on any of
them will take you to the appropriate Guess-a-Move window, which remains open
until you close it with the "x" button on the top right. You can also
place the Guess-a-Move windows anywhere on the screen.
And the answer to your final question is "yes": you can use engines
installed on your machine, or even the Cloud function, to help you predict the
moves. And the Live Book, and whatever other tools you may wish to employ.
Addendum: here's a quick capture of our (not very successful) guesses in
the final round
If you do not see the Guess-a-Move button it means you have not updated your
program. You can check in the "File" menu at the top left of the Playchess
client:
If you are using a different program to access Playchess – e.g. ChessBase
10, 11, 12, Fritz 13, Rybka, Houdini – then you will not see the Guess-a-Move
button (yet). It is best to download the Playchess client and watch the games
of the final round in Wijk with it. The latest update can be found here:
New members can start using the Guess-a-Move function immediately – just
install the latest Playchess client and log in for a trial subscription.
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