Wijk aan Zee, Round 10: Guess Who Wins Again?
Thursday, January 24, 2013 at 12:45AM
Dennis Monokroussos in Magnus Carlsen, Wijk aan Zee 2013

Who else? Magnus Carlsen. Not that he was the only winner, though, as five of the Group A games in round 10 at Wijk aan Zee had a decisive result. Carlsen did what he does best: take a small edge (sometimes not even that), grind away, and persist until the opponent crumbles. Eventually, Erwin L'Ami did, though he defended well for a long time. Carlsen now has a crazy 8/10 (7 of his last 8!), good for a 1.5 point lead; a 2954 TPR and a 2871.8 live rating.

Viswanathan Anand lost ground, as he drew again, against Sergey Karjakin. He tried pressing patiently, a la Carlsen, but without success. That's to Karjakin's credit, but maybe he should have tried longer, as Carlsen did in his earlier game with Karjakin. Or...as Hikaru Nakamura did in this round against Fabiano Caruana. Their game was dead equal for a long time, but at a certain point in the second time control Caruana fell prey to tactics based on Nakamura's bishop pair and lost. With the win, Nakamura caught Anand in second with 6.5 points, and they were both joined by Levon Aronian, who won rather easily against Wang Hao.

Tomorrow is a rest day, and on Friday the round 11 pairings for Group A look like this (player scores in parentheses):

 

 

The other Chinese representative fared better, as Hou Yifan defeated Pentala Harikrishna. Speaking of representatives of the same country, Dutchmen Loek van Wely and Anish Giri drew their battle. Finally, another game involving a Dutchman - Ivan Sokolov vs. Peter Leko - led to a disaster for the home player. Sokolov went all-in on a kingside attack that never looked close to succeeding, and the result was a 26-move wipeout.

Group B has some drama: Richard Rapport and Sergei Movsesian shared the lead with 7 points apiece, and Arkadij Naiditsch and Jan Smeets are just half a pont behind. In Group C, Sabino Brunello leads with a great score of 8.5/10; Fernando Peralta is half a point back.

Games (without notes) here; lots of good reports elsewhere, including the official site, have some annotations by the players. For example:

Article originally appeared on The Chess Mind (http://www.thechessmind.net/).
See website for complete article licensing information.