Anand rapid world champion for 10th time

Viswanathan Anand's speech was a very short one, last night: "Just to thank everyone, I hope you enjoyed it." It had exhausted him, all those rapid games the last four days in Mainz, and therefore the press conference was canceled. He did give a short interview to Vijay Kumar for the Indian television and this we can show you. In the final Anand beat Aronian after drawing three games and then winning the last one with Black. He clinched his tenth title of the GrenkeLeasing Rapid World Chess Championship, the eigth in a row.

Etienne Bacrot en Rustam Kasimdzhanov played 2-2 (both won one game) but no blitz tiebreak was played. The games of the final:

Click To Play

Anand, congratulations on winning the Mainz rapid for the record 10th time. What do you feel?

Well, basically sort of relieved because already this was my 14th game with Aronian here, so?¢‚Ǩ¬¶ I mean we were just playing each other and each other and again and again and again so it was?¢‚Ǩ¬¶ OK finally it seems fair that I took one, he took one. He took 960, I took the rapid event. But OK basically I'm relieved that I can stop now because I really played quite a lot.

So in the final you have three drawn games and an exciting win. How you recall about the last game?

Ehm, basically?¢‚Ǩ¬¶ it was a Catalan and he introduced an interesting idea. I think at some point he was better so his opening was a success. But Black's position has some resources and especially his pawn on a3 was weak. But of course I hadn't expected to win this game. I was quite happy to go for a tiebreak because then at least it's 5 minutes and you can play faster, though of course he is a very good blitz player. But at some point I saw that we could swap bishops, I could move one rook?¢‚Ǩ¬¶ My rook on a7 is doing a fantastic job; it's covering almost all the entry points for him and my other rook will go in and win his a3 pawn and after that he has quite some problems.

You have now 20 more days for the world championship. How you will prepare yourself?

Well, we've already done quite some work, in fact most of July and August I spent working and hopefully now I take a bit of rest, especially after this. I hope it's a good warm-up but OK, we'll just do some last-minute work and about then it's time to start playing actually, having enough preparation.

Best of luck.

Thank you.