Vishy Anand retains World Chess Crown

[Neel Here]

Vishy Anand retains World Chess Championship title
Vishy Anand retained his World Chess Championship title yesterday after a dramatic end to one of the closest matches in the one hundred and twenty four year history of the competition at Sofia.


By Malcolm Pein in Sofia
Published: 9:31PM BST 11 May 2010
World chess champion Indian Viswanathan Anand
World chess champion Indian Viswanathan Anand Photo: AFP/GETTY

The forty year old Indian grandmaster, the fifteenth world champion, secured a further two year tenure and a prize of 1.2 million Euros after the challenger, Veselin Topalov of Bulgaria, cracked in the twelth and final game played in front of his home fans.

The contest was level after two wins apiece and seven draws before Tuesday's decisive game in which Topalov's blunder gave Anand the win that secured a 6.5-5.5 victory.

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Topalov, 35, played with the white pieces which confers the advantage of the first move and is akin to having the serve in tennis. He was expected to go all out for the win as a draw would force a speed chess tie break and Anand, the world's fastest player, would have been a strong favourite.

Anand described the match as the: "Most intense I have ever played where every result was possible until the final game".

"In the end it all came down to nerves and I am just glad mine held," he said.

The contest was characterised by very long struggles and continual cat and mouse in the opening phase as both players tried to lure the opponent into positions prepared in advance on the computer.

The match started with a disastrous loss for Anand after he walked into some prepared analysis that gave Topalov the lead without having to make a single move of his own. Anand struck back immediately in game two and took the lead in game four before Topalov won the eighth game to prolong the contest.

Anand's next title defence will be in 2012 with London the front runner to host the twenty one day competition.

Last month, Topalov provoked outrage in the chess world with a controversial demand for the final to be played in silence. Topalov, a former world champion, invoked little-known rules which allowed him to ban conversation between him and his opponent. It was the first time the rules, introduced in 2005, had been applied to the 120match tournament.

[Tigers_eye]

lol, silent chess? lost with white piece. Anymore humilation left for Topalov? bye bye and don't let the door hit you.

Well done Anand.

[Neel Here]

the way Topa's mentor silvio danailov was playing dirty mind games before the match lost them quite a bit of support in the chess community. anand had to take a 40 hour road trip to reach the destination, due to the volcanic ash problem. when he asked for a two day postponement, not only did danailov (who was apparently speaking for the bulgarian chess fed as well) refuse more than 1 day, he also accused anand of being disrespectful.
this is not the first such incident for topa-danailov duo either, last time they accused kramnik of cheating. he lost that match too !

[Neel Here]

Some interesting news coming in !

It seems Topa had

The team of World Championship challenger Veselin Topalov reportedly spent a large sum of money to secure a 112 core computer cluster running at mind boggling speed. "How did the reigning champion counter this awesome hardware advantage," we asked. Anand answered this question in a candid and very detailed interview broadcast on Monday Playchess. He used a human cluster!

EDIT : More details coming in, Topa's 112 cluster Blue Gene/P supercomputer capable of 500 teraFLOPS, cost 100,000 Euros and has more than 8000 processors !

Anand countered it with a human cluster composed of, hold your breath, Gary Kasparov, Vladimir Kramnik and the young chess genius world no 1 Magnus Carlsen, all of whom helped voluntarily !
I've never heard of this level of GMs helping a rival ! imagine Kasparov helping someone on his own ! he has a reputation of being snooty and aloof !
this is other than his official team of seconds,

The Anand Team in Sofia: standing in the front row are GM Peter Heine Nielsen, Eric van Reem, GM Rustam Kasimdzhanov, Hans Walter Schmitt, Vishy Anand, Aruna Anand, GM Surya Ganguly, GM Radoslaw Wojtaszek. In the second row on the left: Christian Bossert, Mark Lefler. All of the GM seconds worked with Anand in his 2008 match against Vladimir Kramnik. other than that he had the new kid on the block GM Anish Giri help him with match practice.

p.s. just wanted to mention that Carlsen is 19 years world and already world no 1 ranked !! He reminds me of young Anand, especially the liking both have to blitz chess. this boy has greatness written all over his future.

[Tigers_eye]

http://www.banglacricket.com/alochon...ad.php?t=33087
Shaad bhai opened a thread. What a eye-opening reading!!

The boy will be among the top for a long time to come.

[Neel Here]

thanks for that link.
what strikes you about this kid is his attitude, he knows what he is capable of and doesn't mince words.

this is from chessbase too,
http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=6346
http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=6348
here's Anand talking about his help :

But sometime in March he got in touch with us, and said that he would be happy to help for a couple of days. We decided he would come after his tournament in Nice. Basically I had him as a sparring partner. We did check some openings together, but the basic idea was that I would get to play a lot with him. Very few people can simulate a real tournament situation like Magnus can. We played a lot of blitz, and I felt good, because I was able to test a lot of areas I was unfamiliar with before. With Magnus you can test almost any position, because he can play almost any position, and play it reasonably well. In that sense his practical skills are very helpful.

I thought the nicest bit was the last day, when we finished, had a nice dinner, and I told him I will take you to the airport tomorrow when you wake up. At some point he started making this very un-Carlsen-like speech, something like “I had a wonderful time, I really enjoyed working with you, I’m sure you will play well, and good luck and everything,” and then he finished with “or shall we skip all this crap.” I said yes, no problem. I thought that was cute. He stayed in touch a little bit – basically he is always in touch with PH. I owe him a bit. As I said he came for a couple of days before Mexico and Bonn. I think if he qualifies for the next final he should come and train me for that as well.

You know it is possible that he will qualify, and then…?

Well, we are in uncharted territory here. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. But I thought that farewell was really cute.

and a little bit about India's fantastic journalistic standards

Well, by December it was clear that Magnus was going to be number one in the world, and I wasn’t really sure that I should expect his help again – he had already helped me before Bonn and Mexico. I assumed he was not going to get in touch. But then we had this funny situation in India when some journalist asked me who are your seconds. I said that is a secret, but I can tell you one name: it is Nielsen. Of course he published the next day that this one name was Carlsen. I guess he heard “sen” and he heard “second”, he went home and googled *.sen and Carlsen came up. It was funny that Carlsen was outed before he was actually in the team.

[SportsGuru]

Although, I usually monitor football updates and live cricket news, yet it was my great pleasure to listen to the news of Vishy Anand’s once again retaining the World Chess title. Keep it up man!!!