Some traveling and busyness made it hard to keep up this weekend, and this won't be much of a report either - at least not yet. I'll take a page out of other sites' practices and say "more later". What can and should be said now is that despite spoiling the tournament a bit by blundering and losing what had been a better position against the bottom seed Levon Aronian still won this year's main event (generally) in Wijk aan Zee with a very impressive 8-3 score. He had gained more than 20 rating points too - prior to the last round - and looks like he's in very good form heading into March's Candidates' tournament.*
Anish Giri and Sergey Karjakin tied for second a point and a half behind, while third seed Fabiano Caruana could only muster a tie for 4th-6th places. Even more surprising is second seed Hikaru Nakamura's -1 score, not to mention Boris Gelfand's -2.
In the Challengers' group Ivan Saric won with a dominating 10-3 score. Surprisingly and impressively, Jan Timman tied for second with Baadur Jobava with 8.5 points, and had he managed to put Jobava away in the antepenultimate round he would have taken clear second and perhaps threatened for first. Regardless of the counterfactuals, it was an excellent tournament for the 62-year-old Dutch legend.
* Please, no comments listing previous Candidates' events where the top seed had won the last big tournament heading into the Candidates but failed to win it. I'm not claiming that Aronian is somehow guaranteed to win on account of this result, so "correction" is neither needed nor desired.
Dennis Monokroussos
Update: The games are here, albeit without annotations. I managed to catch a little cold over the weekend, and need to get my rest. Sorry!