Biel Rd3: Shirov beats Caruana, Carlsen leads

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, Maxime 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.

Yannick Pelletier and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave had a fun King’s Indian (fun for the spectators in any case) with the action taking place in the center. The Frenchman opted for an exchange sacrifice which culminated into a full rook down as he sought to get out of trouble with a perpetual check. While Pelletier was only too happy to oblige, the real question was whether he couldn’t avoid the repetition and instead play for a full-blown win. With an extra rook, and no threats to his king other than a ton of checks, he may regret letting his opponent off the hook so easily.

The only decisive game of the day was between Alexei Shirov and Fabiano Caruana in a strange game where the Italian player seemed to underestimate Shirov’s chances. It started as a Bishop’s Opening, with Caruana achieving a nice advantage after Shirov’s pawn structure was broken and then shattered. This possibly left him feeling overly confident in the safety of his position, and with one imprecision after another the Spaniard clawed his way back into the game until a bad mistake by the Italian put him in control. After this, Shirov played a very fine game, bringing his king all the way across the board before beginning his own winning operations, ending in a decisive attack.

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. In addition Daniel King is doing round-up shows at 8:00 p.m. on the days he is commenting.

GM Daniel King commenting on the games in round one

Commentary schedule

As a special treat the multimedia commentary live from Biel is also available on 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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