Biel Rd.7: Carlsen, Morozevich, Caruana win, 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, 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.

Morozevich seems to have found his stride, and beat Vachier-Lagrave in round seven to take his score to an impressive 5.0/7 with a 2870+ performance. He was white in the Russian variation of the Gruenfeld, and soon emerged with an extra pawn in the middlegame. The Frenchman chose to instead give up the exchange hoping to gain compensation for a passed pawn but the counterplay never materialized as the Russian held strong on to the tiller, and steered unerringly to victory. At this rate, it won’t take long to see him back in the Top Ten.

Carlsen one-upped Morozevich by playing a positional masterpiece against Shirov and keeping the lead with a superb 5.5/7 and 2906 performance. He played an offbeat Berlin and gave up a pawn to install a beast of a bishop on e5 that acted as a sniper overlooking the entire board. In contrast, Shirov’s bishop was little more than a shy spectator confined by both Carlsen’s pawns and his own. Little by little, the Spaniard’s attempts to fire up counterplay were snuffed out, and Carlsen brought home the win.

The round did not see a single draw, and the game between Pelletier and Caruana was the last to finish. Pelletier managed to stick a huge d6-pawn into Caruana’s position, and by all appearances, this seemed more than enough to hold, or even win. Instead the Italian gave it a very modern treatment, and instead worked his pieces and play around it while preventing the Swiss from improving his position. Pelletier was outplayed, and saw all his attempts at activity frustrated, allowing Caruana to notch up his first win of the event and remove himself from the bottom of the crosstable.

Standings

Video impressions from round five

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.

GM Jan Gustafsson doing live audio commentary on Playchess in English

Directly from the playing venue: GM Miso Cebalo with live commentary in German

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

Commentary schedule

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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