The Hindu : Sport : Victory boosts Anand's lead

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Mar 30, 2005

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Sport

Victory boosts Anand's lead

MONACO, MARCH 29. Continuing his splendid run, Viswanathan Anand outplayed Loek van Wely in their blindfold game of the ninth round and inched closer to the Amber blindfold and rapid chess tournament title on Tuesday.

Fresh after Monday's rest day, Anand came up with a brilliant finish in an endgame involving queens and pawns and forced the Dutchman to resign after 39 moves. The game was fought on an even keel for a major part before Anand managed to push one of the central pawns to the seventh rank and soon brought his king into action. Wely could not find a plan to stop Anand's pawn from queening and resigned. At this stage, Wely's thinking time was down to one minute while Anand still had 12 left in this 25-minutes-a-player time format.

The victory raised Anand's blindfold tally to seven points. Alexander Morozevich and Francisco Vallejo also won to share the second spot with 5.5 points. Overall, Anand has 13 points from 17 outings and enjoys a three-point lead over Morozevich and Vassily Ivanchuk. Anand is due to play with white pieces against Wely when the players return for the rapid game.

The results (Ninth round):

Blindfold: Boris Gelfand (Isr) drew with Veselin Topalov (Bul); Loek van Wely (Ned) lost to Viswanathan Anand; Peter Svidler (Rus) drew with Vladimir Kramnik (Rus); Peter Leko (Hun) drew with Vassily Ivanchuk (Ukr); Alexander Morozevich (Rus) bt Alexie Shirov (Esp); Evgeny Bareev (Rus) lost to Francisco Vallejo (Esp).

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