ANAND LOSES

The Statesman
Aug 18 2007
India

MAINZ (Germany), Aug. 17: Viswanathan Anand fought back hard but
Armenian Levon Aronian proved to be too good, beating the Indian
Grandmaster in tie-breaker in a thrilling final to clinch the Chess
960 World Championships.

Playing this variant of the game for the first time where the position
of the pieces at the start is set randomly for each game, Anand came
from behind to level the scores 2-2 after the rapid games.

Aronian, however, produced a scintillating performance in the shoot-out
to score 1.5-0.5 to lift the title here yesterday. In the playoff for
third place, Etienne Bacrot of France mauled Rustam Kasimdzhanov of
Uzbekistan 3-1.

Anand lost the first game of the four-game match after spoiling a
promising position against Aronian who played with white pieces.

After a lot of manoeuvring, the players arrived at a chess-like
position where Anand had little to worry about. However, for once,
the Indian ace was under pressure on the clock which eventually had
a telling effect. After drawing the next two games, Anand took the
match to tie-breaker that Aronian won eventually. n PTI