Event Heading For A Close Race

By Arvind Aaron

The competition is almost evenly matched in the MTel Masters Chess Tournament being played at Grand Hotel Sofia in Bulgaria. Tuesday was a free day for this category 20 event which had reached its half-way mark.

The banning of draw offers has added length to the games and in some instances quite unnecessarily. In all, eleven games ended in draws anyway and four decisively. Viswanathan Anand, the top seed was expected to do a little better at the start since he had three whites in the first five rounds. He has drawn all five games so far.

Anand plays Topalov on Wednesday with the black pieces. Players take on each other a second time with the reversed colour after the free day. Just one point separates all the six players at the half way stage and the competition by all standards is very close. Another point being that those in the last three places have an extra white in the last five games to come and they can be expected to bridge the gap.

However, there will be one champion on the concluding day as ties will be broken by a play off if necessary. MTel is Bulgaria's leading mobile service company and the occasion being their tenth anniversary. They are staging this event together with Kaissa Chess Management, run by International Master Silvio Danailov. Danailov is manager for three top players, Topalov, Adams and Ponomariov.

The standings after five rounds: 1-2 Michael Adams (Eng), Vladimir Kramnik (Rus) 3/5 each, 3-4 Viswanathan Anand (Ind), Ruslan Ponomariov (Ukr) 2.5 each, 5-6 Judit Polgar (Hun), Veselin Topalov (Bul) 2 each.

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