So, according the statistics, it was far more likely that Carlsen would win 7-3 than Anand would win at all. The final score of that match was 6.5-3.5.
From a statistical perspective, it will again be more likely that Carlsen will win by a large margin than Anand will draw or win.
If the match were longer, the odds would be even worse for Anand fans.
To quote from that article again (and remember, Carlsen was "only" 2862 at the time):
The brevity of the match mitigates Anand’s disadvantage: in a 24 game match with a 66% draw rate, he loses in 98% of the match simulations and wins only 0.7% of the matches. But in a twelve game match, maybe he’ll just get lucky.
Ratings are good predictors of future events, but they are not perfect. Let's say that Carlsen, rated around 2880, were to play in a tournament of 7 other players, all rated at 2780 (100 points lower). He would be the easy favorite to win the tournament. But if we were to change the question to whether he would win, or anyone else in the field were to win the tournament, he would not necessarily be the favorite.
For a national master to make such a basic mistake in statistics and then call those who disagree with him "ratings fetishists" is almost unfathomable to me.
Here's a link to an article by a statistician who discusses the chances for Anand in the last world championship.
http://en.chessbase.com/post/are-the-che-world-champions-just-lucky--part-2-060913
In it, Matthew S. Wilson points out that a world championship match winner is only probably the better player! We can work out, statistically, the odds of the weaker player winning a match, and we can work out, statistically, what sort of a score a person would need to win a match by to be able to say with some certainty that he really was the better player.
In a 12 game match (first to 6.5), the winner had to score a 7-3 victory in order to claim a "statistically significant result". Carlsen-Anand finished 6.5-3.5.
Here are some extended excerpts from that article:
To beat Anand 7–3, Carlsen will need a phenomenal performance rating of 2924; for a similar victory Anand will need an even more unlikely performance rating of 3011. But if the match were 24 games instead, then Carlsen would “only” have to perform at approximately 2866, which is quite possible given that he is currently rated 2862.
Thus, short matches make it difficult to achieve a statistically significant victory. But there is another danger that is of interest to more than just statisticians: in shorter matches, there is an increased chance that the weaker player will be crowned World Champion! Think of the most extreme case: a one game match. In Swiss system tournaments, the result of a round is determined by a single game. And it is not too unusual to see a 2000 player defeat a GM in large open tournaments. Of course this doesn’t prove that the 2000 player is better than the GM; unless something is spectacularly wrong with our rating system, the GM is the stronger player. Upsets are very much a possibility in one game matches, though the 2000 player would not stand a chance in a 24 game match. In general, short matches allow weaker players a decent chance of winning. This is how the FIDE knockout tournaments produced champions such as Kasimdhzhanov and how the 2011 Candidates cycle selected Gelfand as the challenger. Upsets were frequent in the two game knockout matches. For example, in this year’s World Cup, Gata Kamsky (2741) was held to a 1–1 draw by IM Yiping Lou (2484) and Judit Polgar was eliminated in round one.
The 2011 Candidates Matches consisted of four game and six game matches, and sent Gelfand to play against Anand. Gelfand is certainly among the world’s top chess players, but few would argue that he was the strongest opponent for the champion. None of Gelfand’s triumphs in the three matches were statistically significant, and he surely benefited from having Aronian and Kramnik knocked out before the final.
....
Anand–Carlsen 2013
A 12 game match is far shorter than my recommended 26 games, so should we be worried that the weaker player might win by chance? Normally this would be a concern, but here there is one factor working in our favor: a relatively wide gap in the ratings. On the September rating list, Carlsen is rated 2862 and Anand is at 2775. According to the ratings formula, Carlsen is expected to score 0.62 points per game on average in the match. Since Anand is so much lower rated than Carlsen, it is unlikely that he can score an upset even in such a brief match.
So what will happen? Let’s run some simulations of the match. In their classical games, 20 out of 29 were drawn, so the 66% draw rate is still a reasonable assumption. Of the remaining nine games, Anand actually has the edge: six wins, three losses. However, several of his victories occurred before Carlsen reached his full strength; Carlsen won both of the last two decisive games. The ratings system forecasts that Carlsen will average 0.62 points per game. If we combine this with the 66% draw rate assumption, then in each game Carlsen has a 29% chance of winning and 5% chance of losing. Here are the results from running 40,000 simulations of the match: