The Week in Chess

Fabiano Caruana scored a second win in the 2015 Tata Steel tournament when he defeated Ivan Saric in the second round in a Breyer Ruy Lopez. Caruana was somewhat embarrassed to find that the move 14...a5, which took him by surprise had been played by his opponent before. Saric was doing fine until move 29 when he missed that he could play 29...Rxf5 because 30.Qg4 Rf6! works for black. Then he had to play 30...Bxe3 with a playable game. After 30...Qb7 Caruana quickly became active with 32.Qg4 and brought home the full point quickly.

Liren Ding beat Hou Yifan on the black side of a Caro-Kann. Hou sacrificed a pawn and got compensation but her 21.Ne5+ was probably a step in the wrong direction (21.f5!) and was ground down in an endgame.

Levon Aronian hoped to surprise Anish Giri with his choice of the Russian System against the Gruenfeld but Giri was ready and they went into a long line first played by Maxime Vachier-Lagrave. They reached an endgame with Rooks and Bishops of opposite colours where Giri was a couple of pawns down but the position was drawish due to his activity.

Magnus Carlsen admitted to being outplayed by Wesley So in their first game together. This meant that Carlsen (as white) had to be careful and he had to more or less forced a draw before he got into problems.

Baadur Jobava allowed Maxime Vachier-Lagrave to play 8...d5 in one go (without d6 first) in an Accelerated Dragon and they repeated in a drawn position.

Teimour Radjabov and Vassily Ivanchuk drew a lengthy Reti which was more or less balanced throughout.

In the final game to finish Loek van Wely allowed Radoslaw Wojtaszek to escape with a draw after having played a very nice attacking game to get a winning position. A couple of clean wins were 46.Qe2 and quite surprisingly the 53.Qxg4 taking queens off just wins for him too.

David Navara, Wei Yi, Valentina Gunina, Robin van Kampen and Bart Michiels lead the B-Group on 1.5/2.

Round 2 Standings: 1 Caruana, 2pts 2-3 Ivanchuk, Vachier-Lagrave 1.5pts 4-11 Radjabov, Carlsen, Giri, Wesley So, Wojtaszek, Van Wely, Aronian, Ding Liren 1pt, 12-13 Jobava, Saric, 0.5pts 14 Hou Yifan 0pts.

Round 3 Pairings Monday 12th January 2015 12:30pm GMT. Ivanchuk-Van Wely, Vachier-Lagrave-Radjabov, Ding Liren-Jobava, Saric-Hou Yifan, Giri-Caruana, So-Aronian, Wojtaszek-Carlsen