Monday, May 21, 2012

Anand-Gelfand game 8: Anand wins to level the score

Well, I guess that yesterday's result has awoken the world champion, as today Anand won in an almost-inconceivable 17 moves!

It seems that the players moved into un-prepared opening territory quite quickly today, and Gelfand moved aggressively to win Anand's Rook at the price of a Knight, but failed to foresee that his queen was then trapped.

GM Sergei Shipov has this to say about Gelfand's apparent novelty on move 7:

I must admit I wanted to write about this alternative for Black, but I thought it was insufficiently solid - not something for a World Championship match. Black's provoking a white pawn avalanche i.e. the obvious move now is the g2-g4 advance, after which it's hard to come up with anything other than retreating to f6. And what do you get? Black will have lost one and a half tempos and given White the basis for an attack. An extremely risky strategy from the Challenger! As it's not hard to guess, this is a novelty.

The second half of the world championship is certainly much different from the first half; what will happen next?!

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