Ivanchuk Beats Anand For Title
By Arvind Aaron

Vassily Ivanchuk of Lvov, Ukraine is an improved player these days. In the Rapid Chess Tournament at Leon, Spain he beat the World champion Viswanathan Anand by 2.5-1.5 after taking the fourth and deciding game in just 16 moves with the white pieces on June 1.

Pegged with a weakness on the queen side, Anand lost pawns and the first game to Ivanchuk with the white pieces after he had to sacrifice a piece for nothing. Anand hitback nicely also with black in the second game by trapping Ivanchuk's rook to level the scores at 1-1.

A tiring ending saw both players make a 56-move draw by repetition of moves in the third with Anand missing a chance on move 39. In the decisive fourth game, Anand blundered on move 14 in a Nimzo Indian
defence with black to hand Ivanchuk the title. Both 1969-born players are rivals since the World Cadet Championship days.

This result confirms that Ivanchuk has improved widely in the last two years. He had unseated Anand from the world crown in December 2001 at Moscow. Anand still has a huge personal plus score against Ivanchuk but was not at his best in both matches at Leon this time.

Earlier, Anand had defeated Vallejo 2-2, 1.5-0.5 in the semifinals which was decided in the tie-break. In the other semi-finals, Ivanchuk crushed Shirov 3-1 after winning the first two games and making two draws for a place in the finals.