1 February 2016
Magnus Carlsen Wins Tata Steel Masters
Alexey Dreev finished third in the Challengers.
The 78th Wijk-aan-Zee chess festival came to an end on January 31.
In the final round Evgeny Tomashevsky somewhat sweetened a bitter tournament by beating Fabiano Caruana, who took too many risks as Black. Sergey Karjakin held as Black against Shakhriyar Mamedyarov. Both Russian players finished in the second half of the tournament table.
The World champion Magnus Carlsen collected impressive 9 points in 13 games and confidently won the event with a full point gap from the nearest rivals.
Final standings
Magnus Carlsen 9
Fabiano Caruana, Ding Liren 8
Wesley So, Anish Giri, Pavel Eljanov 7
Wei Yi, Shakhriyar Mamedyarov 6.5
Sergey Karjakin 6
David Navara, Evgeny Tomashevsky 5.5
Hou Yifan, Michael Adams, Loek Van Wely 5
A close race in the Tata Steel Challengers ended up in a three-way tie between Bashkaran Adhiban (India), Eltaj Safarli (Azerbaijan), and Alexey Dreev (Russia). The tie-breaks put them in this exact order, and Adhiban will be invited to the Masters tournament next year. A sad final for Dreev, who was very close to qualifying, but did not get much help from Adhiban's opponents in the second half of the tournament. Another Russian rep, Mikhail Antipov, scored 7 points and shared the 4th-5th places.
