NEWS
OTHER SPORTS
DIARY
PEOPLE
MATCH REPORTS
SLIDE SHOW
ARCHIVES

Anand fails to sight win

This year's Amber tournament, in Monte Carlo, is just not going Anand's way. For the first time in over two years, Anand finds his name in the bottom half of a tournament standings list. There are still eight rounds to go, though, so there is ample time for Anand to move up.

In round three, Anand faced Vladmir Kramnik from Russia. Kramnik is one of the very few GMs who has a positive total in career encounters with Anand. (Kasparov and Karpov are 2 others.)

Their Rapid game followed the Rubinstein variation of Queen's Gambit Accepted Classical. They both battled it out, but after 54 moves it was draw.

In their Blindfold game, Kramnik with Black chose the Classical variation of Sicilian defence. The Sicilian is extremely familiar to both GMs, and the fact that the game was being played blindfold would not have mattered for the first dozen moves or more.

In move 18, Anand castled on the queen's side. Earlier Kramnik had castled to the King's side. Games with opposite side castling are sure to be hard-fought battles, and this was no exception. Kramnik immediately began to attack Anand's pieces on the queenside. In the ensuing tactical skirmish, Anand came out a piece down, and resigned.

The win put Kramnik in first place, along with Karpov. Interestingly, Shirov stands number one in the Blindfold section, but is in the very last place in the Rapid games with losses in every round.

In round 4, Anand meets the Bulgarian GM Topalov, whom he managed to beat in the last round of Linares, exactly a week ago.

The Rapid and Blindfold section combined scores at the end of Round 3 are: Karpov and Kramnik 4.5; Lautier 4; Topalov 3.5; Piket, Nikolic, Ljubojevic 3; Anand, Shirov, Ivanchuk 2.5; Van Wely 2; Gelfand 1.