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Report of round 12 - CCT 2010
 World champion Viswanathan Anand’s chances of winning the 72nd annual Corus Chess Tournament are only theoretical. With only Sunday’s last round to go, ‘Vishy’ lags a full point behind A-Group leader Magnus Carlsen who secured his position on top of the standings by keeping Hungary’s Peter Leko to a draw with black in 12th-round action.
So is the world champ disappointed with his performance? Well, not really.
“I’m basically spoiling other people’s tournaments,” he said with a mischievous smile at the start of the news conference he was asked to give after the drumming he handed out to Vladimir Kramnik on Saturday. What Anand meant was that although he couldn’t be the winner, he could at least function as the tournament’s giant slayer. Kramnik, after all, was tied for first place with Carlsen before he suffered his defeat, just as Alexei Shirov was a front-runner until he went down against Vishy two rounds earlier. The world champion may also find some solace in the fact that he remains the only A-Group competitor with an unbeaten record after the twelfth round.
The most remarkable thing, Anand said about his victory, was that Kramnik, who opted for his favourite Petroff with black, “completely forgot what he had planned” after some twenty moves “and then chose something solid.” A white exchange sacrifice not long after proved it was far from solid enough. “It led to a position where white, with his strong pawns, had a clear advantage.” At the 33rd, Anand told the press, “Kramnik looked at me with raised eyebrows. He seemed to think we’d had a threefold repetition. I had to point out that there was a pawn on f7 the first time round.” By then it was clear to everyone else that Kramnik was in deep trouble. Anand handled the remainder so well that some experts said he played like a computer and wondered “whether this meant the world champion is super-human.”
 Asked whether he felt he was unable to play all out because he wanted to keep some of his prepared opening secrets for his upcoming title match against Veselin Topalov of Bulgaria , Anand said “that’s like comparing apples to oranges. In the tournament I play thirteen different people; in a match I play just one. It’s a completely different thing.”
Carlsen’s game against Leko was far less entertaining. Leko surprised experts and chess fans alike when he chose one of the sharper lines to combat Carlsen’s Najdorf but acted in line with his reputation when he managed to reach a dead drawn rook ending around the 20th and to split the point thirteen moves later.
 Shirov had black against Sergei Karjakin and chose the Archangelsk variation of the Ruy Lopez for an opening – the fourth time this line came up in the course of the tournament. He found an interesting novelty that led to an exciting middlegame but the result was a draw after both players came under pressure but made it to the time control.
Caruana-Nakamura and Dominguez-Ivanchuk also ended in a draw, the first after a drawn-out battle over 62 moves from a Sicilian Rauzer and the second after 56 moves in an exciting Scandinavian game. Tiviakov-Short, an uneventful Caro-Kann, had the same result after just 33 moves. In the final A-game of the round, Jan Smeets defeated fellow Dutchman Loek van Wely in 23 moves from a Najdorf Defence. “It was a case of being well prepared,” Smeets’ second Sipke Ernst explained. “We’d had the whole thing on the board at home up to the 17th move, where white was already vastly superior. The rest wasn’t too difficult.”
 The 500-euro “Ymouth-Versatile Award” for the best game of the round in Group A went to Anand. In Group B, where Dutch champion Anish Giri remained a point ahead of the competition, the prize (250 euros) was for Finland’s Tomi Nybäck, who downed India’s Parimarjan Negi in 41 moves from a Grünfeld. Holland’s Benjamin Bok, who downed Daniele Vocaturo of Italy in 46 moves from a Ruy Lopez, won the 100 euros set aside for the prize in Group C. China’s Li Chao, meanwhile, secured final victory in this group. A nine-move draw with black against Holland’s Stefan Kuipers sufficed to out him out of reach of the competition. The Chinese will be invited to enter the Corus B-Group next year.
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