Moscow: Viswanathan Anand introduced a theoretical novelty against Boris Gelfand, sacrificing a pawn for activity with black pieces, in the sixth game of the World Chess Championship being held here at Moscow. Friday’s game ended in a 29-move draw.

At the half-way mark, the match has produced six straight draws, all within 40 moves, and the score remains at 3-3.

Players are still approaching the games quite cautiously, not taking any risks. Legendary Garry Kasparov who visited the match today opined that from the games so far, both the contestants appear to be evenly matched and it is difficult to predict the winner.

“It will be a close match which will be decided only in the final stretch”, commented Kasparov.

The spate of draws reminded many of the 1995 World Championship match between Kasparov and Anand. Seventen years back, in New York, there were eight drawn games before Anand scored his first victory over Kasparov.

It remains to be seen if the reigning world champion and the challenger will be able to change the course of the match earlier than that.

Playing black pieces, Anand continued with his principle decision of defending with the solid Slav defence. But it was Gelfand’s turn to vary from the previous games, as he opted for a different setup with 6.Qc2 in the Meran Variation.

Anand responded by opening up the centre with the pawn push …c6-c5, and accepted to play the position with an isolated pawn on d5. When it seemed that he was going to play a passive middlegame by bringing his pieces to the defence of the d5 pawn, he surprisingly went for a bold sacrifice of the d5-pawn with 14…0-0.

This was a new move which has not been played before. Anand’s decision to sacrifice the pawn was probably encouraged by the engines’ play.

Gelfand pondered over his move, but decided to follow logically. But Anand’s fast play showed that this was a theoretical improvement analysed well during preparations. In exchange for the sacrificed pawn, Anand gained active pieces and control of the centre.

In return, Gelfand decided to play it safe and returned the extra pawn on the 18th move itself, developing his pieces instead. Obviously, he did not wish to take chances with Anand’s home preparation in the ensuing dynamic positions.

Curiously, by the 19th move, as in all the games of Gelfand where he held the white pieces, once again there were no pawns present in any of the central files. This reduced the chances of both the players having any theoretical weaknesses in their position. Once again, it was difficult to understand Gelfand’s match strategy, as he once again did not gain any tangible advantage with the white pieces.

The game soon got liquidated into a rook and bishop ending where white only had theoretical chances because of black’s isolated pawn on c6.

However, after the bishops got exchanged, the players did not see any point to continue in the clearly equal rook ending and agreed for a draw in 29 moves.