Anand clear first after great attack

Round 10 in Linares had the two leaders of the field facing each other. Carlsen played an old line of the Closed Spanish against Anand and out of the opening he got into trouble more and more, because of a familiar theme in these structures: a problem knight on the queenside, and White controlling the c-file. Just when Carlsen seemed to have had the worst, the nice move 26.Rf1! came, that was predicted twenty minutes before already by GM Erwin L'Ami on ICC by the way. After the move had been played, Erwin expected White's attack to be irrisistible and this too he predicted well. With even a Trojan horse on e6, the beauty of Anand's victory was complete.

Aronian-Morozevich started promising: after Shirov's Bayonet move g4 in the Slav it soon led to coffee house chess. Unfortunately the queens were traded soon after that, when the position was suddenly almost balanced. Aronian tried for a while but Moro had a petit combinaison to draw quite easily. Svidler played his tenth (!) draw now but again we cannot really say he played a boring game. Just when Ivanchuk seemed to go for a perpetual, the Ukrainian went on but a bit later he had to settle anyway. A fantastic fight, finally, was Leko-Topalov. In a quiet Najdorf Leko got a small advantage thanks to a pawn majority on the queenside. Then Topalov countered superbly and after the first time control he was a pawn up in the ending. But then Leko started another one of his great defences and on move 84 Topalov had to accept the draw, after he tried really hard in a rook ending. One of the best rounds, maybe the best, so far!



Standings after round 10:

  1. Anand               6,5
2-3. Carlsen, Ivanchuk   5,5
4-5. Aronian, Svidler     5
  6. Topalov             4,5
7-8. Morozevich, Leko     4