Biel Rd.2: Carlsen wins again, Vachier self-destructs

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.

If a title had to be given to the day’s round, Beauty and the Beast might be appropriate. Magnus Carlsen has been confirming not only his status as the number one, but also his return to form as he outplayed Alexei Shirov in a Meran, finishing his game long before everyone else. They played fifteen moves of known theory at which point they deviated. Shirov found himself with a king trapped in the center and serious development problems he never managed to resolve. Eventually he tried to do so energetically, but this just left him open to Carlsen’s counter-strike and soon succumbed. That would be the Beauty, as it also leaves Carlsen on 2.0/2.

The game between former French prodigy Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and returning phenom Alexander Morozevich would be the Beast. The players went for a classic Exchange Gruenfeld, but the Frenchman seemed the better prepared and his initiative soon turned into a deadly attack. This might have decisively turned to his advantage with 23.Qh6+ Kf7 24.Nf4, which he missed, albeit still retaining a good advantage. Then the tragic took place five moves later, and in what can only be ascribed to a massive hallucination, he went for a completely mistaken sacrifice that left him dead lost, yielding the win to Morozevich.

Fabiano Caruana and Yannick Pelletier played a French that was soon reduced to a rather straightforward endgame with few, if any, winning chances. Caruana no doubt felt a need to play it out and try to somehow squeeze a win against the tournament’s lowest-rated player, but the Swiss had few difficulties and the balance was never broken over the 59 moves played.