An off-colour Viswanathan Anand survived a scare as he scored a come-from-behind victory against Cuban Grandmaster Lazaro Bruzon and advanced to the finals of the 19th Magistral Ciudad de Leon chess tournament in Spain.
Anand, who is going through a lean patch, yesterday came through some anxious moments before winning the blitz tiebreak game, 8th of the match, for a 4.4-3.5 victory.
In the final on Sunday, Anand will meet the winner of the match between world champion Veselin Topalov of Bulgaria and Francisco Vallejo Pons of Spain to be held later on Saturday.
It turned out to be a taxing outing for Anand against Lazaro in the clash of former Junior World champions.
Earlier in the Chess Olympiad too, these two had crossed swords and the result there was a stalemate that continued here for the first four rapid games.
It was a surprising result as Anand is highly regarded as the best rapid chess player on the planet. The matches here are played with 20 minutes to each player with a 10 second increment after every move is played.
After the first four rapid games were drawn, the match moved to tiebreak blitz games where Lazaro drew the first blood winning the first game.
Anand was under pressure in the next game, as he needed a win to stay in the match.
However, after Lazaro made some mistakes, the Indian ace was quickly back in the match as he won the eighth game to deliver the knock-out blow to Lazaro.
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