Anand faces uphill task

It was not the best of wedding anniversaries for World champion Vishwanathan Anand on Wednesday, as he lost the third game, before forcing a draw in the fourth, in the Mainz Chess Classics Rapid festival.

Long before the match started, it was clear that the pressure to win would be more on Anand than Braingames champion GM Vladimir Kramnik of Russia.

And, as the match moves into its final leg on Friday, with Anand trailing Kramnik 1.5-2.5 there is no doubt that it's going to be an uphill task for the Indian Grandmaster to come out trumps.

To win Anand has to show the kind of form that won him the Reggio Emilia tournament in Italy in 1991 or, more recently, that at the World championship last year.

Auspicious days have been tough days of chess for Anand in the past few years. On his last birthday, during the World championship in New Delhi, Anand had to claw his way back to escape defeat against defending champion GM Alexander Khalifman of Russia.

But if the pundits are to be believed, Anand is going to stage a historic comeback here. His reputation of being the world's best in Rapid chess makes him the most dangerous player in this variant of the game and Kramnik knows it.

"He is no worse than Kasparov in the rapid chess," conceded Kramnik in an interview to a popular chess website.

The rest day on Thursday must have been a boon for both players amidst heavy schedule and Anand will probably have cooked up something to break the now famous 'Berlin Wall' (named after Berlin defence that Kramnik has been very successful with for the last ten months) of his rival.

The match has generated tremendous response all over the world and whatever be the outcome, the organisers have created history by staging a most significant match in the history of the game.

In the Fischer Random Chess, being run simultaneously, GM Michael Adams of England bounced back into reckoning with a hard-fought victory over GM Peter Leko of Hungary in the sixth game. Leko, ranked seventh in the world, leads 3.5-2.5.

Starting the day after being two down in a short eight- game match, Adams, who has a world ranking of four, played imaginatively to record his first victory.

Fischer Random Chess is an invention of former World champion Bobby Fischer, in which the peices are randomly shuffled before the game. Both players get the same position out of 960 possibilities.