Carlsen-Anand World Championship match 2014 Game 6. Heart stops to beat in such moments, breathing accelerated, mouth starts to turn dry. That is the story of every chess player who waits for his opponent to move after he has blundered. For Magnus it lasted only for a minute while for Vishy the feeling of hopelessness is going to last for nearly two days! Today was one of the worst days for Vishys supporters. Anand missed a tactic which was supposed to be quite easy. Had he spotted it I am 100% sure that he would have won the game. But let us try to see why such a simple and uncharacteristic blunder happened in the game. The game opened as a Sicilian Kan. It was surprising that Magnus went for the Open Sicilian but his choice of 7.Qd3!? was very interesting. Anand played the opening in a pretty passive fashion as he landed in a position where Magnus not only had more space but also the double bishops. Soon Magnus started to increase the pressure little by little. He first pushed his pawn up the board with h4-h5 gaining valuable space and next he lifted his rook from d3 to g3 pressurizing the g7 point. All that was left for Anand was to defend in that position. He did that excellently but as we all know Magnus is a master of keeping up the pressure. But then something unbelievable happened. Carlsen played this move Kd2? which was a horrible error. It gave Vishy the chance to not just win a pawn but also ruin Whites position with the simple tactic Nxe5. Being a chess player I know that criticizing a great player like Anand would not be correct here but I would be justified to say that the tactic was extremely easy and not one that Vishy should have missed. But there are reasons for why he missed it. First of all he did not believe that Magnus could make such a blunder. Secondly Vishy was focussed on the idea of creating queenside play with a5-a4. When Magnus moved his king, Vishy saw no reason why he shouldn;t continue with his queenside play. The momentary lapse in concentration was enough to seal the game in Carlsens favour. The point is that the position was still only marginally worse for Vishy but to play with the feeling of having missed a winning chance is something even the best in the business cannot deal with. Even Magnus was visibly shaken as he moved his king up and down from e1-e2 twice after the blunder. Anand immediately saw that he had missed that chance after he made his move. After that there was nothing much left in the game as Vishy gave away pawns one after another. By the end he was 5 pawns down. A pretty devastating defeat for Anand. I wonder if he can fight back from this blunder. As World No. 2 Caruana rightly pointed out tonight Anand will not be able to sleep. It would be nice for me to write over here that true champions are those who rise when the chips are down but I realize that is extremely difficult if not impossible for Anand to recover from this. But Vishy is a fighter who can never be written off. After everyone was asking him questions related to retirement, he won the Candidates. After losing the second game when everyone started to ask whether it will be Chennai all over again he struck back by winning the third game! As Indians and huge fans of Vishy all that we can do now is to send our wishes and prayers to this great champion that he fights back! A billion hearts pray for you Vishy! Its not the time to give up!
Posted on: Sat, 15 Nov 2014 16:07:37 +0000
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