Shah Mat! The King Is Dead, Long Live The King!

The World Chess Championships are being held in Mexico City and are about to conclude this weekend. World #1 (and Mad Professah's former acquaintance) Vishwanathan Anand of India is leading the field and will likely achieve his decades-long quest to be crowned the Best Player in the World on Sunday. He will be the first non-White World Chess Champion, following decades of Eastern European dominance by players such as Garry Kasparov, Anatoly Karpov and more recently Veselin Topalov and Vladimir Kramnik. Mad Professah has been following the tournament closely.

As of today, Anand is leading by one full point ahead with one more game to play. He has 8.5 points out of 13 (an impressive +4). In second place is Boris Gelfand with 7.5/13 and in third is the current world champion Vladimir Kramnik at 7/13. In the last round, Anand has the White pieces against Peter Leko (6.5/13) while Gelfand has Black against Alexander Morozevich (5.5/13). So unless Anand loses, Gelfand wins and somehow has a better tie-break score than Anand, the Indian Super-Grandmaster will be crowned World Champion later today.

UPDATE SAT 09/29/07 7:35 PM
Anand drew his last game with white against Leko. Kramnik won and Gelfand drew. Thus Anand wins by a full point (9/14) ahead of Kramnik and Gelfand who tied for 2nd at 8/14. In 2008, Anand will play a match against former World Champion Kramnik (in the complicated rules of world chess championship titles, the vanquished champion always gets a rematch with his vanquisher).