Catching Up: MVL Wins Biel Blitz (and Gives a Master Class); Adams Dominant in British Championship
Monday, August 15, 2016 at 1:28AM
Dennis Monokroussos in Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Michael Adams

I'd already mentioned Maxime Vachier-Lagrave's dominance over Peter Svidler in their classical and rapid match in Biel, but it turned out that there was a larger blitz event that followed their match. As it turned out, ironically, MVL and Svidler tied for first and then played a 2-game match to decide the winner. Naturally, Vachier-Lagrave won this one too, 2-0.

A better reason to harken back to Biel is that Vachier-Lagrave gave a "Master Class" on a free day, which you can watch below.

More recently, Michael Adams won the British Championship in style, scoring an undefeated 10/11 to finish a point and a half ahead of his closest challenger. Along the way he defeated the next two seeds, David Howell (recently a 2700) and Gawain Jones, so it was in every sense a dominant performance by the strongest chess player in British history. Congratulations to GM Adams, who was at least once upon a time a reader of this blog, and someone whose success I appreciate as a player of my generation (more or less).

Article originally appeared on The Chess Mind (http://www.thechessmind.net/).
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