BackAnand, the underdog
The former world champion is defending well, but will he be able to regain the championship?
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Sochi: In chess, a large majority of the games played between grandmasters end in draws. A study by The Week In Chess, an online magazine, of around 22,000 games played between top-level grandmasters from 1999-2002 showed 55% had ended in draws. This is because top-level players make fewer mistakes and rarely ones that lead to immediate or slow decimation.
But then, even world champions can sometimes make mistakes like club-level players, and sometimes—though even more rarely—get away unpunished.
For such missed opportunities often determine the winner in close contests.
Computer evaluation swung in a moment from advantage white to advantage black. Everyone following Saturday’s sixth game in the world championship match between Magnus Carlsen and Viswanathan Anand watched in disbelief. Carlsen, the 23-year-old world champion from Norway, had blundered on the 26th move—an unforced error which allowed Anand to immediately seize the initiative against the run of play.
For the five-time world champion from Chennai, who was struggling to neutralize the pressure Carlsen was piling on him, it was like an early Christmas gift.
But sometimes when you aren’t expecting a gift, you don’t reach out for it. Anand missed the one-move opportunity to immediately turn things in his favour, and eventually lost the game, allowing Carlsen to pull ahead at the halfway stage of the 12-game match.
Matches turn on moments like that, British grandmaster Nigel Short said on Saturday via Twitter, recalling a similar “double-blunder" from his own match against then world champion Garry Kasparov in 1993. In the two games since, Anand has not been able to equalize. Worse still, though he has played with more confidence than he did a year ago in Chennai, Anand wasn’t able to create any real opportunity to catch up with Carlsen. Not surprisingly, with only four games remaining, Anand looked disturbed after the eighth game on Tuesday ended in an uninspiring draw. With time running out, Carlsen is not looking to do anything ambitious and is happy to defend his one-point lead from the sixth game. He said he was happy with the draw in Tuesday’s eighth game, and was looking to rest on Wednesday.
That’s how he plays his chess. With a watertight defence, he is happy to grind on small advantages, sometimes for hours, to extract wins without doing anything dramatic. The indefatigable world champion appears to have adopted the same strategy for the match too. To save the match, the challenger has to pull off a miracle. Anand’s much feared homework has not lived up to its billing except in game 3, which he won, whereas Carlsen, who is known to be not as studious as Anand, has consistently shown the depth of his preparation.
Carlsen is clearly a much stronger player than his challenger, evident from the staggering 71-point difference between their ratings. Plus, he is 21 years younger. So it is beyond reason to expect Anand to regain the world chess title at 44—he was the underdog even when he was defending his title against Carlsen a year ago.
For Anand, no outcome could be worse than Chennai, Peter Leko, a Hungarian grandmaster and one of his former aides, had said before the match started. In Sochi, he said, Anand has a huge psychological advantage compared with a year ago, when he was still the world champion and playing before the home crowd to defend that title.
Anand was expected to put up a better fight in Sochi and so far, notwithstanding the missed opportunity in the sixth game, he has. He has defended accurately even in long, physically demanding battles, and has often taken the fight to his opponent.
Anand wasn’t able to survive the full length of the 12-game match in Chennai—it ended in 10 games, with Carlsen winning three and the rest ending in a draw.
This time, he looks set to fight on till the last regulation game. Most importantly, he has won a game to boost his confidence—the first against Carlsen in the classical format of chess in almost four years.
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