Tata Steel 2013 Round 3

The 2013 Tata Steel Chess is taking place from 12-27 January in Wijk Aan Zee in the Netherlands.

This famous annual tournament has three separate single round-robin competitions, the A, B, and C Groups, each featuring 14 players.

The strongest tournament is the A Group and this year features 6 out of the top 10 ranked players; world champion Vishy Anand, world #1 Magnus Carlsen, defending champion Lev Aronian, rising star Fabiano Caruana, world #6 Sergey Karjakin, and US champion Hikaru Nakamura.

Chess.com has live coverage and commentary of round 4 with IM Daniel Rensch & GM Ben Finegold. See here for the latest details (scroll down the page).

Chess.com coverage starts at 05:30 Pacific, 08:30 Eastern in the US (13:30 UTC).

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Round 3 - Official website report

After the dry spell of the first two rounds, the 75th Tata Steel Chess Tournament broke open in the third round with victories in three of the seven games. In sole lead is Russia's Sergey Karjakin after beating Wang Hao of China. The Chinese grandmaster equalized comfortably on the Black side of a Petroff Defence, and could even claim a small advantage after some 20 moves. However, with the strong 27.g4! White turned the tide and after some haphazard play by his opponent in the ensuing rook endgame Karjakin collected the full point and moved to 2½ out of 3.
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The first player to finish his game was top favorite Magnus Carlsen. His clock barely showed less time than he started with, indicating an effortless victory. It was indeed more his opponent Loek van Wely's doing, who mixed up two variations in an old line of the Averbakh King's Indian early on, ending up in an endgame that offered little chances of survival. The Dutchman resigned when the loss of a pawn signaled the collapse of his position.
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The World Number One was joined on 2 out of 3 by World Champion Viswanathan Anand, who beat Fabiano Caruana in an exemplary Ruy Lopez. With small maneuvers – from controlling square d5, to dominating the c-file – the Indian chess wizard kept nagging the young Italian who drifted into time trouble. Anand was especially proud of 31.Kh1!, threatening Qc6. Black promptly made his decisive mistake with 31...Be7 after which White infiltrated with 32.Qc7, with the black king soon running for his life.
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The remaining four games ended in rather uneventful draws, although Erwin l'Ami and Pentala Harikrishna had to take a little care against Hou Yifan and Levon Aronian respectively. The games Sokolov-Giri and Leko-Nakamura were more interesting from a theoretical perspective than from the perspective of the audience.
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Group A Standings After 3 Rounds

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In Grandmaster Group B Sergey Tiviakov had to settle for a draw against Jan Timman and was joined in the lead by Richard Rapport. The Hungarian had no compassion with Holland's Sipke Ernst who recorded his third loss, this time on the White side of a sharp Benoni.
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B Group Round 3 Results

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B Group Round 3 Standings

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In Group C, the leaders Sabino Brunello and Fernando Peralta drew their mutual game allowing Hjorvarr Stein Gretarsson of Iceland and Brazil's Krikor Mekhitarian to catch up with them.
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C Group Round 3 Results

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C Group Round 3 Standings

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Photos from the official website. Videos by Freshmen media. Games via TWIC.