Tata Steel, Round 10: Aronian wins, Carlsen draws

Tata Steel Chess Tournament has continued this afternoon by round 10. Leader of the field, Levon Aronian had a win over Anish Giri, Carlsen drew with Hikaru Nakamura in 21 moves!

There were three other victories for Ivanchuk who beat Navara, Kamsky over Karjakin and and Caruana over Topalov. 
Boris Gelfand and Vugar Gashimov agreed draw in 25 moves, and Radjabov and Van Wely agreed the draw in 40 moves in the game where both players were running out of time. I am just not quite sure whether Radjabov did not blundered his last move and offered the draw to Van Wely who had just seconds left!

Most commentators were focused on the game of Levon Aronian (Black) who played Anish Giri (White).

And this game was the battle of home preparation. Anish Giri tried some psychological trick playing with White Aronian's  "pet-line" in Queen's Gambit Declined, Alatortsev-Petrosian variation. Aronian showed that he is a real expert for this line and came up with some novelty in move 8 (!) and later, in move 13, he decided to sacrifice an exchange on f3! It was obvious that both players were very well prepared because they spent for first fourteen moves 4 or 5 minutes each. However, after move 16th Aronian was 40 minutes better off, so obviously his opponent had to work over the board. Aronian gained certain small advantage but it was obvious that without any counter-play it would be difficult to defend White position. Giri decided to try some blow with f-pawn however, this was not much of help. Aronian stepped up the pressure and he achieved practically won position in move 27, however, he missed the very likely forced line to win. Giri showed his resilience, however, without any counter-play he could not do too much.

He managed to get out of the time trouble and escape to defeat in 40 moves, however, he failed to save the game.

Let's have a look on the game in full.

This afternoon I followed this game on-line on one of Russian chess servers and I tried to translate the commentaries of Russian GM Konstatin Landa. The translation is not brilliant, hence I have not been employing Russian for a long time, however, it may give you some flavour...

Well this round change the crosstable significantly. Aronian is on the top of the leaderboard with 7½ followed by Ivanchuk with 6½ points and Carlsen and Radjabov with 6 points each.