ANAND: Sharing point with Ivanchuk

Wijk Aan Zee (The Netherlands): World Cup champion Viswanathan Anand settled for a quick draw with Grandmaster Vassily Ivanchuk of Ukraine in the sixth round to remain in joint lead in the Corus chess tournament here on Sunday.

Anand shared the lead with world’s highest rated woman, Hungarian Judit Polgar and local star Loek Van Wely who beat erstwhile leader Evgeny Bareev of Russia.

All three have four points each and are followed by Grandmaster Alexei Shirov of Spain who was defeated by Polish Grandmaster Michal Krasenkow on Saturday.

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, Koneru Humpy failed to stage a comeback after the second rest day too and went down against GM Jonny Hector of Sweden.

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 now a distant 12th 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 full well that Ivanchuk was winless so far in the meet.

The opening moves were played quickly and just one minor piece and a pawn were exchanged when the draw was agreed to on the 13th move.