BOTW 2016.01.18
TATA Steel - Wijk aan Zee
The TATA Steel tournament takes place Jan 16-31, 2016 in Wijik aan Zee.
The Masters group features a 14-player Round Robin which mixes the familiar top-5 players -- #1 Magnus Carlsen, #3 Anish Giri, #5 Fabiano Caruana -- with interesting players who don't often get a crack at the top, including Pavel Eljanov, Shakhryar Mamedyarov, Evgeny Tomashevsky and three Chinese players: Ding Liren (#12), 16-year-old Wei Yi (whose king hunt win over Bruzon was one of the best games of 2015) and Women's #1 Hou Yifan.
TATA sponsors provide games with free commentary by GM Yasser Seirawan and various guest commentators.
You can watch them live, starting at 7:30am EST on the TATA homepage:
http://www.tatasteelchess.com/live
Or (more efficiently) you can watch the post-mortem analysis with players who join Yasser after the rounds:
http://livestream.com/chess/tatasteelchess
Curse the Commentators
Russian GM Sergey Shipov's annual year in review appears on the Crestbook site, and it's available in translation on chess24.
While not, IMHO, as interesting as his 2013 review -- where he said, "The most significant phenomenon of the last few years has been the Berlin Variation, putting an end to nothing less than the move 1.e4" -- it has at least one idea that's worth thinking about while watching live online commentary on GM games like those at the TATA Steel event:
as spectators you see the current mistakes of players so fast thanks to computers and us commentators. Previously there were also a lot of mistakes, but you only found out about them much later, in analytical articles. That has its effect.
Computers take microseconds to find excellent moves and expose blunders, so when watching games live with the "benefit" of computer analysis on the side, it is easy to underestimate just how good these players really are when they (merely) play the moves the computers rate as best. Computers can't tell us that a move is excellent: that's a partly subjective evaluation based on comparing the move with the other reasonable alternatives. Unless you are thinking about the game yourself and coming up with reasonable alternatives, then you'll have no idea whether a move the computer ranks as its top choice is excellent (!!) or obvious. So following a game online while keeping your eyes fixed on the computer evaluation actually makes it harder to appreciate excellent moves.
Two ways of reducing that negative effect are available this month while watching the TATA Steel games. First, the Seirawan commentary and the live games from the TATA homepage do not use or display computer evaluations; so if you want to understand what's going on you'll have to think for yourself (with Yasser's help). Second, the TATA Steel site has post-mortems featuring one of the players explaining his game with Yasser, who chips in with questions and comments, and this gives as close a look into a Grandmaster's mind -- without the corrective/distorting effects of computer blunderchecking-- as we can possibly hope for.
For instance, I watched GM Daniel King's Power Play YouTube channel summary of Caruana-Eljanov from TATA 2016 rd.1, and then I watched Caruana's post-mortem with Seirawan. I like King's analysis, and his PowerPlay videos are a great (and free!) resource, but they're not nearly as interesting as watching a couple of GMs struggling to understand and explain what happened in a game that they just finished playing and watching.
See for yourself:
Daniel King Power Play:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7muPvH4W-w
Caruana's post-mortem with Seirawan here:
http://livestream.com/chess/tatasteelchess/videos/109568986
Shipov's 2015 review: Chess24 has English translations
Part 1
https://chess24.com/en/read/news/sergey-shipov-s-review-of-2015
Part 2
https://chess24.com/en/read/news/sergey-shipov-s-review-of-2015-part-two
2015 Qatar Masters video
If the Qatar Masters continues to improve as much as it did between 2014 and 2015, then in 2016 (and beyond) there won't be any question that it is the World's Greatest Open tournament. To see the kind of effort (and money) they put in, watch the review video they released after the 2015 event:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Kz5LL5kqx0&feature=youtu.be