After 82 years the Tata Steel Chess tournaments still remain filled with brilliant players and masterpieces. This years Tata Steel Rapid and Blitz is no surprise with players like Magnus Carlsen the current world champion, Hikaru Nakamura the fastest player in the world, and Viswanathan Anand the previous world champion tense games can appear. Especially when the points won by playing in this tournament go to the players final scores in this years Grand Chess Tour, in which first place winner of the Grand Chess tour will receive about 1/3 of a million dollars. For those unfamiliar with Rapid and Blitz time controls, Rapid means both players have thirty minutes on their clocks for the whole game, Blitz time controls which are arguably the most popular to most players is when both players only have five minutes on their clocks for the whole game.
Right out of the first day in the tournament Magnus emerges as the clear leader of the tournament winning two of the three rapid games and drawing the first of the three. Despite his loss to Wesley So in the Fischer Random World Championship match Carlsen failed to take his revenge against So in the Tata Steel Rapid and Blitz. However, Carlsen makes up for this by annihilating Ian Nepomniachtchi in a Sicilian Moscow Variation which along with the Sicilian Rossolimo is now becoming the most popular openings at the high levels. I tried the Moscow myself a couple times and got great results, so I am can understand why some attacking players have added it to their repertoire. Despite Anand not being able to win a single game in last years Tata Steel, on the first day 49-year-old Anand gives the So a lesson in the endgame and beats him. The only other player with a plus score on the first day was Nakamura wining against Wesley So in round three.
In round two Carlsen after playing the Sicilian Sveshnikov (I too have played this before as well, it is an anti-positional opening that has great dynamic features which I am quite found of) with the black pieces for years decides to try it out one tempo up by playing it as white against Nakamura, and scoring another win in the process. As a surprise in-between rounds Carlsen instead of gong to a chess board to prepare he goes to the rooftop and plays football (soccer) instead! Which he later goes on to beat Giri easily, surely now more players are now going to get inspired to play football now.
As if Carlsen was not untouchable already on the next day he almost gets the perfect score of 3/3 and now is on another level to the other players. When asked about his good form he was quoted as saying “"I think it's all about confidence, that when you start out well you can allow yourself to relax more and take more chances, it's as simple as that." Carlsen at this point had also set a record of having the highest plus score of 6 coming out the rapid section in history.
That was not the only record Carlsen had set this tournament, beaten the previous record of 26.5 which was also set by Carlsen, by half and point leaving the tournament in clear first with a score of 27.0 points. On top of that on the last day Carlsen won all of his games and said; "I think with this result, I showed that I'm still the man to beat." And winning $37,000 dollars for first in this tournament. The excitement continuous as the Big Tata Steel Tournament in January 2020 is coming up and it will be its 83rd year.