Anand or Kramnik ?...or Topalov or Kamsky ..?!

As all chess fan should already know, the coming World Chess Championship 2008 match between the Indian wizard and defending champion- Viswanathan Anand and Russian "bear" - Vladimir Kramnik will be held next week from October 14 to November 02, 2008 in Bonn, Germany.

The match will bring back the world chess championship "tradition" when the World Champion was decided by a match between two player which is the defending Champion versus the challenger who qualified trough zonal, interzonal tournaments and after that play series of matches .

Although the recent version of the World Championship cycle is not completely same with the "traditional" cycle i mentioned before ..but in my opinion, it still better then the FIDE knock out format that have been introduced from 1993 till 2006.FIDE introduced the "not so successful" world championship knock out format where strong players who lost a game is almost impossible to proceed further due to limited game available to level the score. This produced some "lucky" and relatively weak world champion such as Alexander Khalifman , Rustam Kasimdahanov which were not even a top ten players when they won the World Championship !


However, the recent format are not free from debate, first of all, should we call the match in Bonn a World Championship Final match or a semi final match because there is another match between Topalov and kamsky which supposed to be held somewhere this year where the winner will meet the winner of the Anand - Kramnik match to decide the ultimate champion. Confuse ?...me too.....

However don't think about it too much because the most important thing is chess fan will surely enjoyed an exciting match which could bring back the memories of the past epic such as the famous Kasparov-Karpov matches and Fischer-Spassky 1972 which i think is the most memorable, exciting and best world championship final ever -off and over the board !

Back to Anand - Kramnik, i personally will root for Anand (photo left)...because he is ...Anand. His tactical play is exciting to watch compare to the dry, positional and boring style of Kramnik (photo right) which however have gave him many excellent and productive results in the past.

For me Anand will continue the line of great players such as Alekhine, Tal, Fischer, Kasparov whereas Kramnik is continuing the style of legendary players such as Capablanca, Smyslov, Petosian and Karpov.