As expected, the October rating list sees upheaval. Veselin Topalov climbs from no:5 to no:1 with a rating of 2791. Morozevch retains no:2 with 2787. Hard on his heels are Magnus Carlsen and Vassily Ivanchuk (both 2786). Anand drops from no:1 to no:5 with 2783 and Vladimir Kramnik from joint second to sixth spot with 2772.
Two other Indians are in the top 100. Sasikiran is 35 and Harikrishna, who has just won the SPICE round-robin is 62. The 15-year-old Parimarjan Negi has jumped 68 points to reach 2597, which is just shy of Super-GM status.
Negi is 14 on the Juniors’ list (Under 20), which is obviously headed by Carlsen. The reigning world junior champion Abhijeet Gupta (2580) doesn’t make the top 20 Juniors, though his rating is fast improving.
The distance between the top five is 8 points. For perspective, a rating difference of 100 points implies the higher rated player will score 55 per cent. An 8-point difference is imperceptible under normal conditions. It predicts a 50.8 per cent score for the higher-rated player.
Anyhow Kramnik and Anand are unlikely to care about ratings. Their focus is totally on the title match in Bonn. Anand told Spiegel recently that he has been preparing seriously since April and assumes Kramnik will still surprise him.
The match will go through 12 games at normal controls followed by up to 4 active tiebreakers at 25 minutes, followed by two blitz games and armageddon, if required.
It’s a pity that this is a short match because it reunifies the title. Ideally it should been 24 games as most world title matches have been.
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The rating difference, as pointed out above has no predictive value in a short match. The head-to-head score is also not very revealing. Since 1989, they have played 51 times at normal controls with Kramnik getting white on 30 occasions. The score is 6-4 in favour of Kramnik with 41 draws.
All Kramnik’s wins have come with white while Anand has won twice with both colours. The scores in active games and blitz are both in favour of Anand by 9-2 and 4-1 respectively.
Despite their reputations as solid all-rounders, quite a few of the Kramnik-Anand encounters have ended abruptly when one or the other made a drastic error. This is indicative of the value of surprises in top-echelon play.
THE DIAGRAM , BLACK TO PLAY (Anand Vs Kramnik, MTel, Sofia 2005) is from a Petroff Defence, where both are experts. Black must move his queen — where?
The game went 17. -Qe4? 18. Bd1! Qd3 19. Re3 Qxc4 20. Re5 (1-0). White wins a piece. Instead 17. -Qd8 restricts white’s edge to manageable dimensions.