Tata Steel 2016 - Video Recap - Round 13

Opening: E44, A46: Nimzo-Indian: Fischer variation, Queen's pawn game

Player(s): Tomashevsky, Caruana, Hou, Giri

GM Alex Yermolinsky recaps Round 13. Considering the last 60 days, Magnus Carlsen beats the rest of the World 3-0. After the London Chess Classic and the Qatar Masters, the Norwegian from Mars conquers his 5th Tata Steel Tournament, matching the great Anand's record, and showing once again who is the owner of the chess world. Going into the last round, Magnus was in the lead over Caruana by half a point and Ding by a full point. The most important game today was Carlsen vs. ding. the World Champion tried very hard to win it, playing over a rook and bishop vs. rook endgame. At last, after 99 moves, Carlsen had to accept the fact that Ding wasn't going to blunder - which is the only way to lose such an endgame - and stalemated the strong Chinese GM. Meanwhile Caruana was struggling against Evgeny Tomashevsky. One could even think that Magnus kept on playing his drawn endgame to put Fabiano under more pressure. But in the post-game interview, Carlsen said that this was the first time he found himself playing the attacking side of such a rare endgame, and he wanted to try any and every possibility to win. This is Carlsen's style: never give up, even when it looks drawn. Caruana didn't play well, and ended losing his game, allowing Carlsen to win the tournament. The other decisive game was the brilliant win by Pavel Eljanov over David Navara. Eljanov played fighting chess during the whole event: he's the player with the most decisive results. Pavel shares 4th-6th with Wesley so and Anish Giri. Not a bad result at all for the strong Ukrainian GM. Giri vs. Hou deserves to be mentioned, among all the rest of the draws. It was a hard-fought game, where Giri missed a good chance to get the full point, but Hou once again showed she can compete with her elite male colleagues. The Tata Steel tournament is always interesting to follow, because some of the top guns get to play strong GMs who don't participate to super-elite events so often. In Group B Indian GM Baskaran Adhiban won on tiebreaks over GM Safarli and the veteran Russian GM Dreev.