Anand picture perfect after a series of draws

He is now a joint second position with Vladimir Kramnik, the other world champion.

Anand won from the black side of a queens Indian Defence in which both players had doubled pawns on the opposite side of the board.

Timman went for an ambitious drive on the 20th move and blundered thus allowing Anand to seize initiative.

After the queens were exchanged on the 27th move, Anand went for the decisive blow and simultaneously attacked Timman’s knight on ‘a7’ and his pawn on ‘F2’. He won a pawn and invaded the ‘F’ file when Timman resigned.

Anand now has 7.5 points with one more round to go.

This was the second successive defeat for Timman who went down to Gary Kasparov of Russia in the previous round.

The second successive win for Anand brought in a lot of smiles in the Indian camp, even as the world champion said, “It feels good to have one more win in the bag.â€

Meanwhile, Garry Kasparov with an interesting draw against Loek Van Wely of the Netherlands ensured that he would at least tie for first. Kasparov now has 8.5 points and later in the evening Vladimir Kramnik roared back into contention as he defeated Alexei Shirov in a hard-fought game.

Anand plays Loek Van Wely, while Kramnik meets Piket in the next round. Those pairings could produce wins for Anand and Kramnik, who have a good record against their 13th round rivals. But all Kasparov needs against Adams to complete his hat-trick at Wijk Aan Zee is a draw in his last round. But this time his title triumph is certainly not as authoritative as it was last year. Talking of his win, Anand emphasised once more, ‘‘Even during the sequence of draws, I always felt there was no need to panic because I was playing all the strong players early in the tournament. You can only wait for the wins to come.’’

‘‘I felt that instead of his 20th move nb3, if he had played bg2, it would have been an equal position with good draw chances. But his nb3 was a fairly ambitious. I thought for a long time on it almost half an hour, looking for something that might be some advantage for white (Timman),†said Anand.

Hari loses, slips to fifth position
Wijk Ann Zee: Double GM norm holder Pendyala Harikrishna of India lost to Grandmaster Friso Nijboer of The Netherlands in the 10th and penultimate round of the Corus Grandmasters Group ’B’ chess tournament here.

The loss pushed Harikrishna down to 5th position.

Playing black, Harikrishna employed the French Defence and desperately tried to catch up with the tournament leader GM Mikhail Gurevich of Belgium. Composed play by Nijboer in the middlegame gave him substantial spatial advantage and Harikrishna’s pieces failed to give him the desired counter play. The game was over in 33 moves.

— (PTI)