Anish Giri beats Magnus Carlsen at Tata Steel

My wife summed up the news best, "Everyone makes a bad move!"  GM Anish Giri(2686), a dutch grandmaster at age 16 and ranked 52nd in the world beat GM Magnus Carlson(2814) yesterday in the Tata Steel Chess 2011 chess tournament held in Wijk aan Zee, Netherlands.  Wijk aan Zee is a small town on Holland's coastline along the north sea and includes numerous harbors, bars, and hotels that cater to the tourists that visit.  The town is also most famous for hosting the prestigious Corus Chess Tournament which is now called the Tata Steel Chess Tournament.  Before that it was the Hoogovens tournament.  No matter what it is called, it always attracts the best chess players in the world, excepting Bobby Fischer who was always missing.  (ba-dump!)

Most tournaments include occasional upsets, however, this one surely caught everyone by surprise including Magnus!  The latest tweet from his twitter page:  "Could not help blundering for the second day in a row, but at least I somehow saved it today. First free day tomorrow, still 9 rounds to go!"  After his 22 move loss to Giri, who was black in their game, Magnus drew in a 32 move game against Ukrainian, Ruslan Ponomariov.  Anish Giri pulled another unexpected game with Hikaru Nakamura and played him to a draw as well.


Magnus has been enjoying free reign in the chess world with a new website and he has even attracted a prestigious sponsorships from Arctic Securities, G-Star Raw, and others.  His performance is expected to improve as the tournament progresses despite the dismal opening.  Giri on the flipside is starting off very strong, however the length and rigor of the tournament will weaken his game.  


Tata Steel website round 3 report:   "Carlsen referred to the move that cost him a piece -and the game two moves later- but by then his position was already in a sorry state. The real mistake was “11.Qd2, a move intended to surprise me,” Giri explained. “Surprise me it did, but for different reasons. I found a nice way to exploit this weird-looking queen move. I needed some time to check whether my aggressive (see diagram) 14…cxd5 was possible but after 18.exd5 it was clear the position was favouring black; no amount of Elo points could possibly change that."

Standings after round 4

1.	V. Anand H. Nakamura	3
3.	L. Aronian A. Giri M. Vachier-Lagrave	2½
6.	V. Kramnik E. l'Ami I. Nepomniachtchi R. Ponomariov J. Smeets	2
11.	M. Carlsen A. Grischuk	1½
13.	W. Hao	1
14.	A. Shirov	½