Viswanathan Anand draws with Levon Aronian in Round One of Norway Super Chess
Anand playing with White pieces played fast and traded pieces quickly to reach a rook and pawn ending which was drawn after 33 moves.
Viswanathan Anand drew his first game of the Norway Super Chess tournament against Levon Aronian of Armenia on Wednesday night.
In a Spanish game, Anand playing with White pieces played fast and traded pieces quickly to reach a rook and pawn ending which was drawn after 33 moves, a press release said on Wednesday.
The first Super Chess tournament in Norway was struck by lightning on the inauguration day with ten super GMs belting moves in high speed fashion. Blitz is the new name or rather the most popular name of a fast variant of chess which earlier went by the name of lightning Chess, a few years back.
In a novelty of sorts, this was the medium to decide the pairings and the colour for each of the ten participating super GMs in the event where the first round was played late Wednesday night. The players finishing in the top five would wield White pieces in five of the nine games while the last five will play with five Blacks and four Whites.
The games were played with time control of three minutes for each player with an increment of 2 seconds for every move. This dizzying speed virtually made it impossible for the spectators to follow the games live.
Reigning World Champion Viswanathan Anand who first hit the international headlines as 'the lightening kid' for his super speedy moves was once again impressive and tied for the second to fourth place with Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura, all finishing in the respective order after tallying 6/9 points each, late on Tuesday night.
Segey Karjakin however finished a clear first with 6.5 points. Peter Svidler finished fifth with 5.5 points. Levon Aronian, one of the strong contenders for the title had to settle for ninth place while former World Champion Veselin Topalov ended up last in the ten player all-play-all event on Tuesday.
Anand won five games and drew against Carlsen and Topalov and most surprisingly lost to Hikaru Nakamura and John Ludwig Hammer, the host entry and incidentally defeated the winner Karjakin. Carlsen on the other hand lost to Karjakin and Teimour Radjabov.