World champion Viswanathan Anand played out a draw with Russian Alexander Grischuk and remained in joint-fourth place after the seventh round in the Magistral Ciudad de Linares Chess tournament in Linares on Friday.
At the half way stage of the eight-player double round-robin tournament, the Indian ace has 3.5 points.
Grischuik remained atop the table on five points out of a possible seven, a full point clear of Norwegian prodigy Magnus Carlsen and Vassily Ivanchuk of Ukraine, who scored beat Levon Aronian of Armenia.
Anand shares fourth place with Aronian, whose double defeat in last two rounds have severely dented his chances in the tournament.
The sixth place is held by Lenier Dominguez of Cuba while Wang Yue of China and Teimour Radjabov of Azerbaijan share seventh place on 2.5 points.
Grischuk held his own against Anand, whose experiment with the queen pawn opening continued. After coming out with a minor surprise on move three when he decided to avoid the main lines of Grunfeld defense, Anand settled to play the Samisch attack against the King's Indian
defense.
Interestingly, the King's Indian has been enjoying immense success in this tournament and this game was another attestation to that.
Anand tried to make a foray on the king side but the Russian was quite up to the task in finding the right manoeuvres. After Anand castled on the king side it was clear that the game headed towards a draw.
The peace was signed in 32 moves.
Ivanchuk scored a thrilling victory over Aronian in another King's Indian of the day. Aronian went for a topical structure but found Ivanchuk well-armed in all departments of the game.
The complexities turned in favour of Ivanchuk after an erroneous plan by the Armenian in the middle game and there were no chances to recover as the game progressed.
Ivanchuk took 44 moves to register his first victory in the tournament.
Teimour Radjabov played out a draw with Carlsen after employing the Italian opening with white pieces. Carlsen had little trouble in equalizing after harmless play by white and regulation exchanges maintained the balance.
The game was drawn in 34 moves.
Lenier Dominguez tried but could not make headway against Wang Yue in another drawn affair of the day. For the records it was a Petroff defense that lasted 57 moves.
