Viswanathan Anand is an Indian Grandmaster born in 1969.Vishy, as he is known to his fans, became India´s first Grandmaster and World Champion, first winning the FIDE Championship in 2000 defeating Alexei Shirov in the final and in 2007 winning the World Chess Championship double round-robin tournament with 9 out of 14.
He won several super tournaments including Corus five times (1989,1998,2003,2004,2006), Linares three times(1998, 2007, 2008) and Dortmund Sparkassenmeeting three times(1996, 2000, 2004) .
He is known for his excellent Blitz and Bullet game, which earned him the additional nickname of “Lighting Kid”.
He won 6 Chess Oscars and is one of only 6 players to achieve an Elo rating of 2800.
Veselin Topalov is a Bulgarian Grandmaster born in 1975.He played in the FIDE World Chess Championship 1998,1999,2000,2002,2004 and finally winning the 2005 tournament scoring 6,5 out of 7 points in the first half of it. In the controversial 2006 reunification match against Kramnik he narrowly lost in tie breaks.
By defeating Gata Kamsky in matchplay 4,5 to 2,5 he gained the right to play Anand in the 2010 World Championship.
He won several super tournaments including Linares, MTL Masters and Corus.
He was ranked number one for 27 months.
The game was played on April 24th . Going into the match the two had played 67 games against each other with Anand winning 17, Topalov 13 with 37 draws.
The first game of the Match saw a Grunfeld exchange. Topalov sacrifices a pawn in the opening with immediate positional advantage and initiative. After blitzing for more than 20 moves Topalov goes outside Anands preparation by a rook lift on the f-file. In the following position one of the player soon goes wrong and allows a brilliant, deep sacrifice and a swift win. A worthy start to the series.
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