Anand beats Carlsen, finishes fourth in blitz event ahead of Norway Chess tournament

Oslo (Norway), May 31

Indian chess players continued to get the better of world champion Magnus Carlsen as after R Praggnanandhaa, Viswanathan Anand defeated the world No. 1 in a one-day blitz tournament ahead of the 10th edition of the Norway Chess championship.

Anand and Carlsen met in the seventh round of the blitz tournament -- one of the shortest formats of the game played at the international level -- and the Indian emerged winner.

Anand was playing with white pieces and the game was looking headed toward a draw but Carlsen tried to force something and landed in trouble and had to resign on the 43rd move.

Overall in nine games, Anand won three, drew four games, and lost two.

With a total score of five points from nine games to finish fourth behind Wesley So of the United States, Carlsen of Norway and Anish Giri of the Netherlands, Giri, Anand and Shakhriyar Mamedyarov of Azerbaijan finished with five points each but Giri finished third while Anand and Mamedyarov were placed fourth and fifth respectively.

The single round-robin blitz tournament was organised to decide the pairings for the main event of the Norway Chess festival -- the super-strong classical chess tournament involving 10 players.

This over-the-board chess tournament will be the first classical event this year for Anand, who had recently won the rapid section of the Superbet Rapid & Blitz chess tournament in Poland, which is part of the Grand Chess Tour.

Others in the 10-player classical event are Carlsen, Wesley So, Giri, Mamedyarov, Teymur Radjabov of Azerbaijan, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave of France, Veselin Topalov of Bulgaria, Wang Hao of China, and Aryan Tari of Norway.

In each round in the main tournament of the Norway Chess festival, players will have 120 minutes to complete the game with an increment of 10 seconds after 40 moves.

In case the classical game ends in a draw, the players will play an Armageddon game within 20 minutes, with the player with white pieces in the classical game getting 10 minutes to complete the game while the one with black pieces getting 7 minutes, with an increment of one second per move, starting from move 41.

In case the game ends in a draw, the player with black pieces is considered as winner.

A win in normal time control will earn a player three points while a defeat will get none. The winner of the Armageddon game will get 1.5 points while the loser will get 1 point.

The classical tournament will start with the first round on Tuesday and end on June 10.

The event carries a total prize fund of 2,500,000 Norwegian Krone (Rs 2.06 crore approx) with the winner getting 750,000 NOK (Rs 61.88 lakh approx).