Thursday, October 30, 2008

Anand is Chess King



BONN: October 29
Viswanathan Anand kept the World title with a 24-move draw in the 11th and penultimate game of the 12-game World Chess Championship final in Bonn. The Indian playing with white pieces against Vladimir Kramnik took an unbeatable 6.5-4.5 lead to retain the title.

The game opened in a Sicilian Najdorf, as Anand was expected to go for a draw and Kramnik was expected to thwart all such attempts to try and force a win to keep himself alive in the match and take it to the 12th game and then force a tie-breaker.

The game ended in a draw after 24 moves as Kramnik failed to find a win despite trying to complicate the game.

Anand earlier won three games, the third, fifth and sixth and lost the 10th in a match that looked one-sided till Kramnik brought back some life with a win in 10th game.

In the 11th game, Anand needing only a draw managed that in a game that had a 1. e4 start and led to a Sicilian-Najdorf, which Kramnik rarely plays. Kramnik went all out for a win and tried to create wild and unstable positions to throw Anand off-guard, but the Indian Grandmaster was up to the task.

In fact as Kramnik overstretched in a do-or-die battle, he actually allowed Anand greater play and may well have lost. But in the end the game ended in a 24-move draw.

According to the pre-match rules, the two players share the purse of 1.5 million Euros equally.

NIIT congratulates Mind Champion Anand on retaining title

NEW DELHI: NIIT chairman Rajendra S Pawar congratulated Viswanathan Anand for retaining the world title. In his message Pawar said, “We congratulate NIIT Mind Champion, Vishy Anand on becoming the undisputed World chess champion.”

NIIT have been Anand's sponsors for almost a decade now.

“Anand has displayed a grand strategy in 2008 by choosing the games that he wanted to win, foregoing an important tournament like Bilbao to focus on and win the ultimate match against Kramnik,” he said

Anand beat Kramnik 6.5-4.5 with one game to spare in the 12-game match in Bonn. That helped the Indian Grandmaster retain the title he won in the Linares-Morelia Linares tournament last year. It also makes him the first player to win the official World title in three formats.

He won the World title for the first time in a 128-player championship format in 2000 when it was played in India and Teheran, Iran and the tournament was sponsored by NIIT.

That was followed by a closed tournament in Linares-Morelia last year and now in match-play against Kramnik. It also ended speculation over Anand's ability at the highest level in matchplay.
Caricature by Syamal Das
-Updates on Viswanathan Anand sent by Team Anand at NIIT

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