The Week in Chess

Levon Aronian moved to a 7/9 score to lead the 76th Tata Steel tournament by a point and a half with only two rounds remaining. Anish Giri, Fabiano Caruana, Leinier Dominguez (next to play Aronian on Saturday) and Sergey Karjakin. This was the final awayday for the event as it visited the High-Tech Campus Eindhoven. Later in the year the Norway Chess tournament will be even more peripatetic. In these economic times events have to work hard to publicise themselves and the day in Eindhoven seemed to go well.

Aronian beat Karjakin in a very nice game where he turned superior piece positioning into an extra pawn in a rook and pawn ending. Most probably there was a way to hold this for Karjakin but he couldn't manage it.

Wesley So won a very complicated struggle against Loek van Wely who played the King's Indian and the struggle could have gone either way. So was relieved to win after scoring only a half from his last three games but admitted he must have been worse at one stage but then Van Wely got short of time and 39...Bxc6? (39...dxe5) lost out of hand.

Arkadij Naiditsch looks ready for home as the event has gone completely wrong for him. Today was the worst of the lot as an experimental opening with white (I believe used by Jobava) quickly went extremely bad, extremely quickly against Pentala Harikrishna who just tore his disorganised position to pieces.

Hikarua Nakamura is another player for whom the event probably can't finish too soon. Today he drew a long game against Fabiano Caruana which at least in the early middle-game was very difficult for both sides.

There was more strangeness from Richard Rapport 1. d4 Nf6 2. Bf4 c5 3. dxc5 against Anish Giri but this quickly became a Rook and Pawn endgame with almost balanced chances.

Boris Gelfand and Leinier Dominguez Perez played an interesting draw in the Gruenfeld. Gelfand is another player who is probably just about ready to draw a line under this event.

Round 9 Standings: Aronian 7pts Giri, Caruana, Dominguez, Karjakin 5.5pts Harikrishna, So 5pts Van Wely 4pts, Rapport, Nakamura 3.5pts, Gelfand 2.5pts, Naiditsch 1.5pts.

Round 10 - Saturday 25th Jan 2014 Giri-Karjakin, Dominguez-Aronian, Van Wely-Gelfand, Harikrishna-So, Caruana-Naiditsch, Rapport-Nakamura.

I will be in commentary for the Internet Chess Club with Ronen Har-Zvi for this round. Looking forward to it.