BOTW: 2017.01.18

John Upper's picture
Submitted by John Upper on Wed, 01/18/2017 - 15:36

TATA Steel takes a day off, but there's some exciting chess to watch online with the Toronto Dragons playing the Montreal ChessBrahs in the PRO Chess league match, Wednesday, January 18, 2017 at 6:45 pm EST, which is this week's Best of the Web

PRO Chess League, Round 2: Toronto vs Montreal

The PRO Chess League consists of 48 teams from around the world, with many of the world's top-10 players, playing online rapid matches once a week. This week is round 2, and pits the two Canadian teams against each other: Toronto Dragons playing the Montreal ChessBrahs at 6:45 pm EST.

Toronto:

  1. GM Bator Sambuev
  2. GM Gergely Szabo
  3. GM Razvan Preotu
  4. IM Michael Song

Montreal:

  1. GM Li Chao
  2. GM Alexandre LeSiege
  3. IM Aman Hambleton
  4. FM Michael Kleinman

Games live with commentary on chess.com:
https://www.chess.com/tv

You can choose which game(s) you want to watch here:
https://www.chess.com/live 

2017 TATA Steel Videos 

Canadian GM Eric Hansen is currently playing in the TATA Steel Challengers group, Jan 14-29, 2017.
After four rounds, Eric is in the middle of the pack with +1 =2 -1, his loss coming to Marcus Ragger, who leads with 4-0 (!).

Wednesday Jan. 18 is a day off for TATA, so there is no live chess to watch there; but after round 3, commentator Yasser Seirawan was joined by four players who discussed their games: Magnus Carlsen (win over 17-year-old phenom Wei Yi), Lev Aronian (draw with Nepomniachtchi), Wesley So (beat van Wely) and Eric Hansen, who beat Dutch champion Jorden van Foreest. Seirawan is a pleasant host and strong player who isn't shy about pressing his guests to explain their moves and discuss alternatives. Watching these is the closest the rest of us will get to hearing what's going on in a GM's mind, before it gets stuccoed over with computer-checked variations.

You can choose any of the videos from the first four rounds -- including analysis with Sergey Karjakin and tournament leader Pavel Eljanov -- on livestream: 
https://livestream.com/chess/events/6877809

You can watch Eric's post-mortem here: 
https://livestream.com/chess/events/6877809/videos/147042713

Before you do, you might want to play through Eric's deceptively easy-looking win (in the player below). White is clearly winning after he plays the Tal-approved g5-g6 "sac" to lever open lines against the Black King. That finish may make the game seem very one-sided, but during the post-mortem it is particularly instructive to see some of the problems which Eric was worried about during the game.

..
() - ()
 
 Round:  Result:
..

Category: