Anand forces easy draw at Linares

An easy draw by Vishwanathan Anand, attestation of Ruslan Ponomariov's rise to the top and Alexei Shirov's victory hotted up the battle for top honours after nine rounds in the Linares Super Grandmasters chess tournament.

With five more rounds remaining in this category-20 seven-players-double-round-robin event, Garry Kasparov, who had a bye, maintains the position atop the table with 4.5 points from seven games.

World champion Ponomariov joined the big 'K' at the top with an excellent victory over England's Michael Adams while Anand and Spaniard Shirov share the third place on four points from eight games.

Anand had no problems in holding tournament minnow Pons Vallejo with black pieces as the latter did not come out of a disastrous loss to Kasparov in the previous round.

Playing black, the Indian stalwart faced the English opening and quickly deployed his pieces to rightful squares to equalise comfortably.

A bit of shadow boxing only led to simplification of the position. Though Anand tried his chances on the king side he failed to achieve anything worthwhile.

With the position hanging in balance and not much to play for, the draw was agreed to after 21 moves.

Youngest ever World champion Ukrainian Ponomariov bravely entered the wild complications of Marshall gambit where even the best fear to tread against Adams.

Having been the most successful exponent of the opening for past many years, Adams was obviously delighted to start with but his happiness was short-lived. On the 18th move the game was out of existing theory and Ponomariov gained control of the centre with an excellent exchange sacrifice.

Adams went for the counter attack on the queenside but found Ponomariov well armed there too. It soon became a futile battle once Ponomariov got his queen pawn rolling and Adams' position was soon torn to pieces. The game lasted 45 moves. It was a sweet revenge for Ponomariov who lost his earlier game against Adams in this tournament.

Shirov and Ivanchuk played out a lively game in the Anti-Marshall opening where the former held white pieces.

Shirov threw caution to the wind soon in the middlegame when he pushed his queenside pawns to win a stranded knight. Soon after Ivanchuk won an exchange and appeared to be cruising smoothly with his rook and three passed pawns in the mid of the board against two knights of Shirov.

The Spaniard defended excellently and counter-attacked well until Ivanchuk fell prey, crumbled under pressure and blundered away a rook on the 35th move.

As Shirov captured the hanging piece with his queen, a dismayed Ivanchuk called it a day. Postmortem analysis proved that Ivanchuk was not worse when disaster occurred.

Results (round 9): Ponomariov (Ukr) beat Adams (Eng); Shirov (Esp) beat Ivanchuk (Ukr); Vallejo (Esp) drew Anand (Ind); kasparov (Rus) had a bye.