Morozevich beats Pelletier in last round Biel (VIDEO!)

In the last round of the Accentus GM tournament in Biel Alexander Morozevich defeated Yannick Pelletier. The Russian finished second behind Magnus Carlsen, who drew with Fabiano Caruana. The other game, between Alexei Shirov and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, also ended in a draw. Video with Biel impressions.

General info

The 44th Biel Chess Festival took place July 16-29 in Biel, Switzerland. The 'Grandmaster Tournament' was a six-player, double round robin with Caruana, Pelletier, Shirov, Carlsen, Morozevich and Vachier-Lagrave.The rate of play was 2 hours for 40 moves, then 1 hour for 20 moves and then 15 minutes to finish the game, with 30 seconds increment from move 61. The 'football' scoring system was in effect: three points for a win, one for a draw and zero for a loss. Besides, no draw offers were permitted before move 30. More info here.

Impressions of Biel

This is our video with impressions of the city and the tournament. It was also shown at the closing ceremony.

Round 10

"The more pieces you exchange, the less you can blunder," joked Alexander Morozevich during his post-mortem with GM Miso Cebalo. The Croatian grandmaster, who gave commentary every day in Biel, responded to the Russian: "Especially in the morning rounds!" The 10th and last round of the Accentus GM tournament started as early as 11AM... Morozevich couldn't win the tournament any more, but played for a win anyway after his opponent Yannick Pelletier didn't treat the opening very well. Especially castling queenside on the 13th move was wrong, where the Swiss GM should first have traded bishops. It was instructive to see that in the next phase the white bishop was White's biggest problem: it was doing nothing. Black's position was improving more and more, and with very accurate moves Morozevich didn't give his opponent any chance to survive. Magnus Carlsen, who had already won the tournament with a round to spare, played the Philidor Defence against Fabiano Caruana. The Philidor? Did he every play that before? Well, a world's number one should be capable of playing anything, and Black came out of the opening without any problems. Caruana had to give up his bishop pair to avoid getting into a position where he couldn't really move. In the game the Italian got a slightly worse position but as there was no way for Black to make progress, Carlsen offered a draw just before the time control. The quickest game of the round was the one between Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and Alexei Shirov. In a well-known gambit line of the Open Catalan, Shirov came up with a logical novelty and then the Frenchman entered a line that soon led to a move repetition. It was not a surprise that Carlsen won this event. The Norwegian again played at his very high level and took two more rating points home. A bigger story might be the impressive second place for Alexander Morozevich. After winning the Russian Championship Higher League, he did very well yet again, and now won 30.7 rating points in two events to reach a virtual 21st place in the world rankings. But, to him rating is much less important than the level of play he reaches, as he told us in an interview we did with him after the last round. We hope to publish it somewhere in the coming week. Tomorrow the author of this report hops on a train again, in the direction of Dortmund, Germany. We were told there's some chess there too!

Games round 10

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Videos by Chessbase

The open tournament was won by Ni Hua, left on the picture. Together with his compatriot Bu Xiangzhi he will play the Politiken Cup in Copenhagen before returning to China.

Photos © ChessVibes

Links

• Official website
• Sergey Shipov live analysis
• Chessbase videos
• Games in PGN via TWIC