Anand Makes 36/40 In Mainz Simultaneous Display
By Arvind Aaron

Viswanathan Anand won 34 games, drew four and lost two in his 40-game simultaneous display at the Rhinegold Hall of Mainz Hilton on August 6.

Anand, 40, took four hours and 23 minutes to score 36 points from his 40 games. His defeats were to Bernd Grill who was rated Elo 2229, and Henrik Karlzen of Sweden. His 34 victims included Siddharth Gopakumar of India.

There was no opponent for the world champion Anand this year due to the recession. In the previous years, Anand has played and defeated Vladimir Kramnik, Ruslan Ponomariov, Alexei Shirov, Judit Polgar, Alexander Grischuk,
Teimour Radjabov etc. at Mainz.

This year, the Mainz Chess Classic has been sized down to a three-day affair from a normal week long schedule. The scaled down agenda was a 40-board simultaneous display by the World Champion Viswanathan Anand, 20-board Chess960 simultaneous display by the World Women's champion Alexandra Kosteniuk of Russia and another simultaneous by the  world chess960 champion Levon Aronian of Armenia.

The last event scheduled for Saturday-Sunday is the famous Open Tournament which has attracted big names likes Levon Aronian, Alexei Shirov, Rustan Kasimdzhanov, Alexander Grischuk etc. The show is run by Hans-Walter Schmitt and his Chess Tigers team from Frankfurt.

Home                                                   Published on Aug 07, 2010