Anand Leads Linares-Morelia 2008

World Chess Champion Viswanathan Anand is currently leading the famous Linares-Morelia super-tournament at the halfway point by a half point with a score of 4.5/7. Last year, Anand became the world's highest rated player after he won Linares XXIV by a full point with a score of 8.5/14.

Linares is a tournament where the eight strongest players in the world are invited to compete in a double round-robin tournament (where everyone plays each other twice, once with Light pieces, and another with Dark pieces). The first seven games are played in Linares, Spain and the second half is played in Morelia, Mexico.

This year's tournament has World #3 Veselin Topalov, 17-year-old phenom World #13 Magnus Carlsen of Norway, World #9 Vassily Ivanchuk, World #10 Levon Arounian, World #8 Peter Leko, World #12 Teimour Radjabov and World #7 Alexei Shirov. Curiously, former World Champion and World #2 Vladimir Kramnik has skipped Linares for the second year in a row.

The New York Times chess blog Gambit has excellent coverage of the tournament as well as a very cool plug-in which allows one to view the games with annotations. Years ago Mad Professah used to be a chess player on the international circuit as a teenager and attended a few of the same junior tournaments as Anand "back in the day." We were usually the only two non-white people in the room.