Anand held for third time; Abhijit, Hari win

WIJK AAN ZEE - Viswanathan Anand was held to his third straight draw in the third round of the Corus Grandmasters chess tournament.

With this third draw against Cuban GM Leinier Dominguez Perez Monday evening, Anand has 1.5 points from three games, and trails in tied fifth place.

Anand, while not exactly in trouble, had to defend a Ruy Lopez while being a pawn down against Leinier Dominguez Perez. He was on the board for 77 moves, but never did he seem to be losing.

There were four decisive games and all came with black pieces. Achieving one of them was Alexei Shirov, who is three out of three and leads the field by half a point. Shirov’s hot form continued with another win, this time against Sergei Tiviakov in the Sicilian. He won in just 31 moves.

Magnus Carlsen, the teenaged prodigy and world’s highest rated player has 2.5 points after a win over Loek Van Wely. American Hikaru Nakamura beat Nigel Short and moved to tied second at 2.5 points. Vassily Ivanchuk after two draws got his first win over Jan Smeets and was at two points. Vladimir Kramnik drew with Fabiano Caruana and Sergey Karjakin drew with Peter Leko in other games.

From an Indian point of view, there were two wins, one each in Category B by Pentala Harikrishna and in Category C by Abhijit Gupta. Parimarjan Negi drew his third round game in Group B and Sowmya Swaminathan lost her game in Group C.

Hari (2672) scored a good win over lower rated Anna Muzychuk (2523), while Negi managed a good draw in 39 moves of a Sicilian-Najdorf against a higher rated Arkadij Naiditsch.

Abhijit Gupta (2577) ensured his rating was not disturbed as he beat Stefan Kuipers (2340) in just 40 moves of a Sicilian-Rauzer, where the Indian had black.

Sowmya found herself out of depth against Rob Swinkels and lost her second game in three rounds.