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The name of the winner is unpredictable
The Bulgarian player Veselin Toplalov leads the tournament with advantage over his opponents. He will face the last round of the Chess Master of Bilbao after tying today with the Indian player Viswanathan Anand, the world champion, in 41 moves in more than 2 hours. Topalov, the chess player who is living in Salamanca, leads the ranking one point ahead of his opponents, although his advantage it is not decisive to win the tournament. The Armenian Levon Aronian –who was nearly beat by the Ukrainian player Vasili Ivanchuk– can also win the 150.000 euros winning award if he beats the Azerbaijani player Teymur Radajabov and Topalov ties with Ivanchuk. A part from that, Ivanchuk and Carlsen still have an opportunity to win the tournament.
Anand and Topalov didn’t want to fight to the death. Anand is not playing his best game because he might be thinking about the match against Vladimir Kramnik in which he will defend his world champion title. The second one was playing with black pieces and he was defending his leadership in the tournament.
The result was a pacific game; the players didn’t risk too much, in fact, the most aggressive move they made was a variant from the Caro-kann Defense. They maintained an equilibrate position during the game, so Anand asked Topalov to brought the end to a tie. However, Jesús Mena, the referee of the game, after asking his mate José Luis Fernández didn’t approve the draw and asked them to continue the game. Finally, after a 2 hours game, they ended the game by an eventual draw by repetition, in the 41 move.
The other possible winner, Aronian, played ambitiously against the Spanish variant proposed by Ivanchuk. His victory would have placed him in the first place of the ranking along with Topalov. He retrieved a pawn using an original plan and, finally, the game ended in a tower and a bishop against a tower and a knight fight. Everybody thought that the Ukranian player was going to win, but the prediction was not right. Ivanchuk, committed some mistakes two minutes before the end of the game; consequently, he allowed Aronian to tie in the 69 move, after a 5 hours fight. Ivanchuk didn’t mind explaining his choices to the audience, although he was not happy with the final result. The audience began to clap their hands to support the decision of the three times winner of the Ciudad de Linares tournament.
The Norwegian player, Magnus Carlsen, playing with black pieces, tie with the Azerbaijani player Teymur Radjabov. The young player tried to do his best using the ambitious Caro-Kann Defense. However, in the opening, he was already in an inferior position and could do nothing but defend himself and tie with his opponent after 53 moves.
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