From: "World Chess Championship", INTERNET:newsletter@mark-weeks.com Date: 01/01/01, 13:23 Re: Chess History on the Web (2001 no.1) Site review - UPITT (IV; Anand) As you probably know, Viswanathan Anand is FIDE's new world champion. He beat Alexei Shirov 3.5-0.5 in the last round of the FIDE knockout event to claim the title which had eluded him in two previous world championship matches. Anand is the first world champion from outside the ex-Soviet Union since Fischer beat Spassky in 1972. With Xie Jun as women's champion, the Asian continent can claim both the men's and women's FIDE titleholders. The 21st century has been forecast to be the 'Asian century' and Asia is off to a good start in chess. Daily reports on the knockout event were published by 'The Hindu' at www.the-hindu.com, the 'Online edition of India's National Newspaper'. In case you missed them, I created a special page at... http://www.mark-weeks.com/chess/a0a1$w02.htm ...which links to these reports. You can sense the excitement in the reports as one of India's favorite sons advances relentlessly on the world title. You might be very pleased to see that The Hindu's coverage of the women's event was almost as extensive as its coverage of the men's event. Anand didn't win the title easily. After tying for first with Adams in the 1993 PCA Qualifiers, Groningen, he beat Romanishin +3-0=4, Adams +4-0=3, and Kamsky +3-1=7 to qualify as the PCA challenger. Playing against Kasparov in the PCA title match, held September 1995 in New York, Anand scored only a half point in a mid-match stretch of five games and lost by the discouraging result of +1-4=13. A few years later he emerged victorious in the 1997 FIDE Knockout Matches, held at Groningen. His match results of:- - Rd.1 seeded directly into the second round - Rd.2 +2-0=0 vs. Nikolic - Rd.3 +1-0=5 vs. Khalifman - Rd.4 +2-0=0 vs. Almasi - Rd.5 +1-0=1 vs. Shirov - Rd.6 +1-0=1 vs. Gelfand - Rd.7 +1-0=8 vs. Adams allowed him to qualify as the FIDE challenger. He then battled Karpov to a +2-2=2 tie in standard games (40/100 plus 30 second clock increments), but lost the title match by +0-2=0 in the first rapidplay (game/25 plus 10 second increments) session. The match, held January 1998 in Lausanne, was widely condemned as unfair to Anand, who was given only a few days rest after the Groningen gruel before facing a fresh Karpov, who had been seeded directly into the final match. Anand did not play in the next FIDE World Championship Knockout Matches, held in Las Vegas during August 1999. His participation was prevented by a contract with organizer Serge Grimaux to play a 16 game match with Kasparov near the end of 1999. The match collapsed a month after the end of the Las Vegas event. Anand's result in the just completed New Delhi/Tehran knockout event was as convincing as his result three years earlier in Groningen:- - Rd.1 seeded directly into the second round - Rd.2 +1-0=1 vs. Bologan - Rd.3 +1-0=1 vs. Lputian - Rd.4 +1-0=1 vs. Macieja - Rd.5 +1-0=5 vs. Khalifman - Rd.6 +1-0=3 vs. Adams - Rd.7 +3-0=1 vs. Shirov He again completed the tournament without losing a single game. It may have escaped your attention that we now have an unusual circular situation in world championship chess matches. Anand beat Shirov who beat Kramnik (in 1998) who beat Kasparov (in 2000) who beat Anand (in 1995). These four will be joined by ten other top players at the category 19 Corus tournament to be held 12-28 January 2001 in Wijk aan Zee, the Netherlands. Kasparov won the 2000 edition with a score of 9.5 out of 13; Anand and Kramnik tied with Leko for 2nd through 4th places with 8.0; Shirov did not participate. The 2001 tournament promises to be a great show. --- To honor Anand's win, I decided to create a page summarizing 'Anand's Tournament, Match, and Exhibition Record', just as I did recently for Kasparov and Kramnik. I described my technique in detail in Chess History on the Web (2000 no.20/-21), so I won't repeat myself too much this time. I downloaded the Anand file (ANAND2PG.ZIP) from the University of Pittsburgh (UPITT) archive at http://www.pitt.edu/~schach/. The DIZ file informs us that ANAND2PG covers 'GM Viswanathan Anand (IND): 1112 Games, 1984-1998'. The last games in the file are from the 7th Melody Amber tournament, held March 1998 in Monaco. After preparing the UPITT file and removing 75 duplicate game scores, I searched my archive of 'The Week in Chess' (TWIC) files and extracted Anand's games from TWIC 163 (1997-12-22) through TWIC 320 (2000-12-25). This yielded 311 games in 28 events, with the last game from Tehran (2000.12.24 Rd.4), the match with Shirov. I also found a smaller, older file at... http://members.xoom.com/chessdata/players/anand.zip ...This carefully constructed file contains 659 game scores, up to and including the Tal Memorial (Riga) and the Kremlin Stars (Moscow), both PCA events held in April 1995. The early games of a player's career are the most difficult to locate, so I also downloaded Anand's games for the years 1984-1989 from the Chesslab database at www.chesslab.com. After adding 24 games from missing events and 11 games missing from incomplete events, I had a total of 1383 games in my PGN collection. I added round numbers to many events and games, but didn't have time to look at the early games from the Xoom and Chesslab files. I'll do this as soon as I can. I returned to my local chess store and bought a copy of 'Vishy Anand: My Best Games of Chess' by Vishy Anand in collaboration with John Nunn. You can find the book on Amazon.com at... http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1901983005/worldchesscham.7 ...along with six reviews. I compared Anand's book with my file, and found at least one missing game, which I'll also add to the collection when I get a chance. I have links from my site to Amazon for Anand's book, as well as for books by Kramnik and Kasparov. These links are constructed in such a way that I can count clickthrus, which gives me a simple way to see which books are most interesting to my site's visitors. The link to Anand's book draws three times as many clicks as the link to Kasparov's book, while the link to Kramnik's book draws twice as many clicks as Kasparov's book. I'm not sure what, if anything, this means. Finally, I created the index page overviewing Anand's career and uploaded it together with the PGN file to... http://Mark_Weeks.tripod.com/chw01a01/anand.htm ...from which the collection of PGN games can be downloaded. It's a small token of respect for a great player. I hope that we see a lot more of Anand in future world chess championship clashes! Here's wishing you a healthy and prosperous New Year, Mark Weeks