Zurich: Five-time world champion Viswanathan Anand will have to put behind the dismal show in the just-concluded Grenke Classic tournament and quickly get his act together when he takes on another elite field in the Zurich Chess Challenge here.
Losing as many as three games out of a possible seven, Anand finished the Grenke Classic tournament as one of his worst performance ever. The Indian ace will have to buckle up and be ready for a fresh challenge in just four days after the nightmare.
Anand not only lost three games but also ended up losing important 15 rating points, which also saw the Indian slip to ninth spot in live world rankings.
While the Grenke Classic was dominated by eventual winner World champion Magnus Carlsen of Norway and Arkadij Naiditsch of Germany, this event will see Fabiano Caruana of Italy start as the top seed in absence of Carlsen.
However, the tournament will see some strong contest with Gibraltar open champion Hikaru Nakamura of United States, former world champion Vladimir Kramnik of Russia, Levon Aronian of Armenia and Sergey Karjakin of Russia as participants under a unique format.
All the six players will start their campaign in a blitz tournament and the standings will determine their colours in the round-robin classical format.
Once the colours are decided the players will compete in five rounds of Classical Chess in a round-robin format and after Classical they will play another set of round robin in the rapid format and the combined scores of two formats will be taken into account to decide the winner.
In the Classical format however, each win will be worth two points and a draw one point, while in rapid each win will fetch just one point and a draw half a point.
Source: http://eprahaar.in