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June 15, 1999
NEWS
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Anand proves too goodA newspaper in León, on Sunday, ran the headline "Anand masacró sin piedad" - Anand massacre without mercy. Yes, it was just that as Indian Grandmaster Vishwanathan Anand humbled Anatoly Karpov 6-1 in the Advanced Chess contest in Leon, Spain.
In the second game, Karpov, this time with black, took more time checking lines and working with the computer. Once again he got into fairly severe time pressure, but at some stage Anand, after careful analysis with ChessBase, decided that there was no way he could force a win. So, instead of playing solely on Karpov's time, he offered a gentleman's draw. The third game saw Anand turn on the pressure with the black pieces early on and never let up till the end. In this game both players were allowed to use databases. On the fast Compaq machines they had super-fast access to 1.3 million games, historical and contemporary. The programme both players were using was ChessBase 7.0. Karpov learnt some of the more advanced features just hours before the game, while Anand had been familiar with ChessBase since 1987, when it was still running on an Atari ST home computer.
The Indian chess genius even found time to configure the screen, setting the board colours and size to the way he likes best. In the end both players ended up with the game Agdestein vs Karpov, Gjovik 1991 on the screen, with the difference that Anand had spent just a few minutes, while Karpov had used up more than half his time on the clock. After that he was (again) in severe time trouble, while Anand sat there, coolly working out all the attacking lines in advance with the computer, checking everything carefully with one of the world's most powerful analytic engines, Hiarcs (written by Mark Uniacke from England). The audience knew exactly what was coming - many moves before the end, while Karpov had to react almost instantaneously. He had no time to consult Hiarcs, although he turned to the screen briefly after each move, wondering whether he could enter the moves and thus obtain some computer assistance in his desperate defence. So, after three games, it was 2.5 to 0.5 for Anand, with three games to go. Many believed that Karpov may have underestimated the awesome power of the duo, Anand plus Hiarcs, and was paying a heavy price for not being as adept with the computer. The excitement of this encounter in the northern Spanish province capital reached a dramatic climax for the next two rounds. The theatre, where the event was being held, was completely packed on Saturday for rounds three and four. Once again, Anand won his first game with black in round three. Karpov, who had learned the main database functions of ChessBase just a few hours earlier, was in panic and it was certain it would turn into a deeply humiliating defeat for the FIDE World champion. In the fourth round, Anand started to play the moves he had planned for his opponent. When the lines got thicker, he extracted all relevant games from the 1.3-million-game database provided by ChessBase and stored them in a new database, which he created on the spot, quickly defining it as his new "Reference database". In this way all future queries were directed at this subset of a few hundred games, and the answers came instantaneously. The result was that Karpov ran into terrible time trouble, while Anand could reserve 20 to 40 minutes of the one-hour total for the critical phase of the game. He reached a potentially disastrous position (with a pawn less in a rook ending), and was also in time trouble and had to abandon the help of Hiarcs. He sat at the board thinking in the traditional way, and came up with "a very nice solution", as Anand later said. The game ended in a draw.
Round six saw Karpov again running out of time as Anand proceded to win Advanced Chess 6-1. The victory will surely boost the confidence of the Indian Grandmaster, who plays Garry Kasparov in the privately sponsored 'Ultimate World Chess Championship' (UWCC) match. The players will play a total of 16 games, sometime in October. The venue is likely to be Prague, with a total purse of US $3million for the match. Photographs courtsey: www.chessbase.com
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