World Championship only weeks away!
World Champion Viswanathan Anand will defend his crown against Boris Gelfand. The match begins May 11th and will be held in Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery. This will be Anand’s second defense since winning the crown at a championship tournament in 2007 in Mexico. He defended his crown against both Vladimir Kramnik and Veselin Topalov.
There has been a lot of interest in this match for a multitude of reasons. Most recently, Ilya Levitov (Chairman of Russian Chess Federation) has given a number of interviews about his vision and the agreement to host the match in such a place. According to Levitov, “classical chess is opera” and he wants to bring back the renaissance of chess by making it more attractive and appealing to viewers.
On the official site, it states,
The FIDE world chess champion title match between Viswanathan Anand (India) and Boris Gelfand (Israel) will take place from 10 to 31 May in the Engineering Building of the State Tretyakov Gallery. The prize fund for the match is 2.55 million dollars, 60% of which will go to the winner and 40% to the loser.
This title match will precede the Candidates tournament which will be held in March 2013 to select the next challenger for the world title. The tournament will be a double round-robin tournament with eight players (including the loser of this match). The winner of that tournament will face the Anand-Gelfand winner in November 2013.
Interesting insight from chess players about match…
https://moscow2012.fide.com/en/33-prematch-stats/61-expert-opinion-en
Dear Daaim,
I stumbled upon your wonderful site by a google search “Chinese lady Trechiakov”! And I wasn’t going to spend time on chess or on the PC today – too much gardening to do!
I was especially interested in the archive photos as I collect player photos myself. You may be interested in my collection, and in any event I’ll be listening to the Drum during the World Championship.
Keep up the excellent work.
Happy Easter,
JEH
I’m surprised there isn’t more being said about the WCh Match. We finaly have two contestants, Anand-Gelfand, who’ve made it based on merit alone. They won the most important matches, they’ve been at (or near -Gelfand) the top longer than Carsen’s been out of pampers. I don’t get it.
This was the fear. Maurice Ashley made a mention of this in the interview I did with him. There has been almost no mass media attention (outside of the chess world). We are less than a month away too. Shame.
Anand and Gelfand inspect playing venue
https://www.chessdom.com/anand-and-gelfand-meet-in-moscow-during-the-venue-inspection/