Are you not entertained? The climax of this year’s elite Tata Steel tournament was as riveting as it was vulgar. After two weeks of sublime classical chess played over-the-board in the Dutch town of Wijk aan Zee, the winner was decided by two blitz games and an armageddon playoff — crash, bang, wallop. Surprisingly, neither Carlsen nor Caruana remained in contention. Instead, it was the Netherlands’ two top players, Anish Giri and Jorden van Foreest, vying for the title. Giri is a steady world-class player who already tied for first in 2018, losing out to Carlsen in the playoff. The Dutch no. 2, van Foreest, is less experienced, but his games have always fizzed with ideas. He seems to have fused that with some extra maturity, and, like Giri, was undefeated on 8.5/13.
The playoff began with a kerfuffle, as the arbiters appeared keen to stage it while Firouzja and Wojtaszek were still at a critical stage of their final game, six hours in. Once they got started, Giri had much the better of it, but van Foreest was resourceful, so both blitz games were drawn. In the armageddon game, Giri spoiled a won position, then won a bishop by accident, only to find himself in a hopeless race with the clock which made him blunder catastrophically. As van Foreest frankly put it: ‘He played the better chess, but maybe I played the faster chess in the end.’ That makes him the first Dutch winner since Jan Timman in 1985. For Giri, it was a hideous way to lose, but during the prize-giving he was admirably unselfish in his wish that the drama of his loss in the last seconds might popularise the game a bit more.
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