Biel Chess Festival: Pentela Harikrishna's 3rd place finish no mean feat, but errors at crucial moments still a bane
The Grand Master tournament of the Biel Chess Festival
featured an eclectic field of participants in its Golden Jubilee edition. In
the mix were names like the Czech number one, David Navara; former FIDE world
champion, Ruslan Ponomariov; and world’s highest rated woman player, Hou Yifan.
India’s frontman at the event was the Guntur-born Grand Master, Pentala
Harikrishna.
Harikrishna had put up a reasonably good show in his last
tournament, the Geneva Grand Prix, only to falter at the later stages. In Biel
too, he did not fail to impress. The Indian ace was on an unbeaten run, having
won three and drawn five of his eight games, and was leading the tournament
with Hou Yifan after the penultimate round.
However, just like in Geneva, Harikrishna fumbled at a
crucial moment in the tournament and missed out on winning the title prize. In
the final round, he failed yet again to convert his tournament lead into a
title prize as he blundered right out of the opening and suffered his only loss
of the tournament against Etienne Bacrot.
When the curtain rose, Harikrishna was seen struggling
against much lower rated opposition. In the first two rounds, he drew against
two lower rated opponents - Rafael Vaganian and Nico Georgidias. It was not the
best of starts, but Harikrishna compensated for it with a brilliant game in the
third round against Alexander Morozevich. The latter is known to be one of the
most original thinkers in the modern era of chess. Even the greats of the game
have great respect for him. To match such a player in calculation and
complicated moves was a great effort by Harikrishna. Although the game ended in
a draw, one could already sense that Harikrishna was coming back in form. After
the game, the tournament’s official commentator, Grand Master Daniel King said,
“Although Harikrishna has had three draws so far, if he shows that kind of
calculating form, I think we could be seeing him storming through in the
tournament.”
And boy, was he right! In his very next game, Harikrishna
demolished the Norwegian International Master Noel Studer in round four and Hou
Yifan in the sixth round. This was Hou’s only loss of the tournament. With a
win in the penultimate round against Ponomariov, Harikrishna made sure that he
had a shot at the title and was leading the tournament with Hou going into the
final round.
The stage was set. This was Harikrishna’s chance to not only
win the title but also finish with an undefeated score at such a high profile
tournament. He was paired against the Frenchman, Bacrot. Harikrishna had white
pieces. He put faith in the Italian System yet again. Of course, it is a strong
opening and white generally gets a small but stable advantage by playing it.
More importantly, Harikrishna had played this opening before
on several occasions. Maybe it just wasn’t Harikrishna’s day. Right after the
opening phase of the game was over, on move 21, he made an inexplicable blunder
and lost his game. On the other hand, his rival, Hou, made the most of her
opponent’s inaccuracies and won her game in style and became the champion of
Biel Chess 2017. Harikrishna’s opponent, Bacrot, who was a point behind him
before the round, also jumped past Harikrishna by half-a-point and took the
second place while the Indian ace had to be content with the third place.
Third place is by no means a bad result. But given that he
had the chance to grab the title; it is unfortunate that Harikrishna had to
miss out on winning such a prestigious event. While beating Levon Aronian was
sheer genius in the Geneva Grand Prix, losing to Li Chao only shows that
Harikrishna is still unable to provide a clean and flawless tournament.
Within less than a month’s time, he will be playing at the
Chess World Cup in Tbilisi, Georgia where players like Magnus Carlsen and
Viswanathan Anand have confirmed their entries. With his performances in Geneva
and Biel, Harikrishna has more than proved his capability to take on the best
in the world. But it is also seen that he can falter at crucial moments.
Harikrishna currently has a rating of 2741 and is ranked 22
in the world. In December 2016, he had reached a career high Elo of 2770 and
was world number eleven. Since the last eight months, he has lost 30 Elo
points. Losing and gaining Elo is quite common in chess, however, 30 Elo points
is a significant amount of rating and the very fact that Harikrishna has not
been able to maintain his Elo at the 2770 mark shows that he is yet to
stabilise among the world's top ten.
The natural question on the mind of every Indian chess fan
is whether Harikrishna can ever take the spot of Anand as the best Indian chess
player. Age is on his side. Harikrishna is 31 years old while Anand will turn
48 this December. However, the consistency is still missing in Harikrishna’s game.
Currently he is going through the phase of gaining exposure of playing against
the best players in the world regularly. The India number two has just played
20 games against 2800+ opponents in his career. Compare this to Anand who has
played well over 200 duels against the best in the world, and the difference
between the two becomes clear.
If Harikrishna keeps getting regular invitations to the top
tournaments, and he keeps weeding out errors from his game, there is absolutely
no reason why he shouldn’t be giving the Carlsens, Aronians, and Fabiano
Caruanas a run for their money. For many players who are stuck in the 2680-2700
zone, Harikrishna is an inspiration. The way he jumped from 2700 to 2770 and
broke into top ten of the player rankings is displays his genius. We only have
to now see whether he can take the final leap of breaking into the 2800 Elo
zone. It’s not going to be easy, but one can be sure that Harikrishna has it in
him to push his limits.
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