Bryne:Reigning World Champion Viswanathan Anand played precisely and perfectly to defeat Teimour Radjabov of Azerbaijan in the seventh round of the Norway Super Chess tournament. The venue shifted once again, this time to the beautiful Flor and Fjaere Island.
Sergey Karjakin shrugged off his 6th round loss to Magnus Carlsen and bounced back with a victory over Hikaru Nakamura. Karjakin with 5.5 points maintains his slender lead over second placed Magnus Carlsen who follows half a point behind. Anand and Levon Aronian are sharing third spot with 4 points each.
The tournament touted as one of the strongest ever has ten players in fray in a Round Robin format. Two more rounds are scheduled on Friday and Saturday with Thursday being the second and final rest day.
In an all Norwegian battle, Magnus Carlsen defeated Jon Ludwig Hammer after the latter went hay wire with a series of inaccurate moves during the first time control.
The encounter between Peter Svidler and Veselin Topalv was a Sicilian one and ended with shared honours on move 34. Levon Aronian of Armenia also had to stay content with a draw against Wang Hao of China.
In a Catalan game where Anand played with the Black pieces, the opening advantage did go to the Indian as early as the 10th move against Radjabov.
Anand kept his King in the centre and steam rolled his pawns on the Queen side and forced Radjabov’s pieces to retreat, right from the word go!.
Later Anand castled and his pieces dominated proceedings on the queen-side. The advanced pawns also posed plenty of problems for Radjabov and he could somehow never get a clear-cut plan for defence.
Anand strengthened his grip on the game with crafty exchange of pieces and wrapped up the game on the 34th turn when his pawn advanced to the 7th rank devastatingly.
Later at the press conference, Anand said "He had I think one of the worst days ever. He's been in bad shape for a while, a couple of months now’ said Anand later.
Anand now goes into the rest day with a good mind set and is slated to play Jon Ludwig Hammer and Wang Hao respectively in the last couple of rounds.