Anand sitting on top but Humpy loses her way

World Cup champion Viswanathan Anand quickly settled for a draw with Grandmaster Vassily Ivanchuk of Ukraine in the sixth round to remain in joint lead in the 65th Corus chess tournament here.

Anand shared the lead with world’s highest rated woman Judit Polgar of Hungary and local star Loek Van Wely who put in another fine performance to beat erstwhile leader Evgeny Bareev of Russia. All three have four points each in their kitty and are followed by Grandmaster Alexie Shirov of Spain who was defeated by Polish grandmaster Michal Krasenkow yesterday. Shirov is on 3.5 points while five players — braingames champion Vladimir Kramnik, Alexander Grischuk (both Russia), Veselin Topalov (Bulgaria), Bareev and Ivanchuk shared the fifth spot with three points each with seven more rounds remaining in this 14-player tournament.

In the grandmaster ‘B’ tournament, former world junior girls champion Koneru Humpy failed to stage a comeback after the second rest day too and went down against GM Jonny Hector of Sweden.

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Top seed GM Zhang Zhong of China continued with his winning run and scalped Dutch GM Harmen Jonkman to reach 5.5 points from six games. Humpy is placed a distant 12th right now on 1.5 points. Vassily Ivanchuk has not shown any brilliance at all in this event. In fact the magician from Lvov (Ukraine) has not gone past the 20th move in the last four rounds and has agreed to draws just after or during the opening.

It was a queen’s Indian defence as Anand was probably looking for some exciting battle, knowing well that Ivanchuk was win-less so far in the tournament.