Thursday, October 23, 2008

Chess World Championship 2008 : Anand poised to beat Kramnik

 

Anand has crushed Kramnik in 3 of the 7 games of the ongoing World Chess Championship 2008 ... in the 3rd, 5th and 6th games with the other games ending in a draw. Looks like an unassailable 3 point lead with 5 games remaining. Kramnik will need a miracle to win from here.  Featured here is the 5th game which Anand won with the black pieces.

During my schooldays I was an avid reader of Sportstar primarily for their cricket coverage. The first time I heard of Anand was in one of the issues in '87 which carried a cover story about a guy who had just won the Junior World Chess Championship held in Philippines. 

Soon after that in quick succession within the same year he became the first Indian Chess Grandmaster ( youngest in the world ) and also the youngest ever Indian to win the Padma Shri. 

Vishy ( Vishwanathan Anand ) quickly became a phenomenon and a role model ... many of us even skipped cricket after school to play chess and cram opening moves and middle game tactics ... which later helped me win some inter-hostel chess tournaments at IT-BHU :-)

Over the years of course Vishy has been going from strength to strength ... being one of the few to have a near par win-lose ratio with the mighty Kasparov. In rapid chess he's of course unparalleled having beaten the best : Kasparov, Karpov, Ivanchuk, Kramnik, Shirov, Topalov et al multiple times to win most of the tournaments. In 2007, after the unification of FIDE and Kasparov's breakway PCA, Anand became the "undisputed" world chess champion ...

Anand will surely win the championship yet again this year ... which will re-establish his status as the undisputed Chess champion of the world !!!


2 comments:

  1. the 6th game was even better. read the detailed analysis at http://www.uep-worldchess.com/

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  2. yahoo he won and the 3rd game was actually the highlight of the tournament

    ReplyDelete