The Week in Chess

The second round of the Tata Steel tournament saw three more decisive games and already no-one has a 100% score. Wesley So, Levon Aronian, Sergey Karjakin, Hikarua Nakamura and Anish Giri all have 1.5/2.

Levon Aronian beat Fabiano Caruana in the top battle of the day between potential winners of the tournament. Caruana took on a Gruenfeld type position in spite of the start with 1.c4 and Aronian it seems got a good position. Aronian was glad he managed to win from there implying he hadn't been entirely happy with his play in the middle-game. In the end Caruana couldn't save the ending a pawn down.

This tournament is a new start for Anish Giri with a new coach in Vladimir Tukmakov. Giri got a winning advantage which he would have crowned with 20.Bxe7 but instead 20.g4 was inaccurate and he had to win the game again which he did after the inaccurate 24...Na5 combined with Naiditsch's time pressure. 30...e5 put black's king in a mating net.

The final win of the day came from Richard Rapport whose incredibly risky choice of the Budapest Gambit against Boris Gelfand seemed to score a bulls-eye. Gelfand played dreadfully missing quite a lot and becoming quite lost although Rapport said afterwards that he then did his best not to win the game he got over the line in the end.

Wesley So and Hikaru Nakamura played for the first time and it finished in a draw. They both seemed to be saying that after their post-mortem the game was pretty balanced, it did look like So was at least slightly better throughout.

Sergey Karjakin got close to nothing against super-solid play from Pentala Harikrishna in the Queen's Gambit and they drew in 40 moves.

Leinier Dominguez Perez surprised Loek van Wely in the opening with 6.Na3 leading to a huge think from the Dutchman, 6...Qa5 seemed to surprise in reverse and 7.Qd5 again after a big think definitely isn't the most testing. The game was eventually drawn in 26 moves.

In the B-Group seven players Dimitri Reinderman, Baadur Jobava, Sabino Brunello, Xue Zhao, Jan-Krzysztof Duda, Benjamin Bok, and Kayden W Troff all have 1.5/2.

Round 2 standings: So, Aronian, Karjakin, Nakamura and Giri 1.5pts/2: Harikrishna, Dominguez, Rapport and Caruana 1pt: Van Wely 0.5pts: Gelfand, Naiditsch 0pts.

Round 3 pairings 13th Jan 2013: Van Wely-Giri, Harikrishna-Dominguez, Caruana-Karjakin, Rapport-Aronian, Nakamura-Gelfand, Naiditsch-So.