Chennai: Grandmaster Viswanathan Anand on Wednesday said that he was aiming to cross the 2,800 Elo rating and win the FIDE world title in the coming years.

Anand, who is popularly known as Vishy, told reporters here that his ambition now was to cross the 2,800-mark in Elo ratings and win the FIDE world title under the FIDE reunification system.

"This year has been good to me. I have been performing so well that I will have to keep the momentum to cross the 2,800-mark and win the FIDE world title."

On his future plans, he said, “For a start, the 2,800-mark, is something that I would like to go for. Since the reunification has been started out, the reunified title by the FIDE will be one of the moot point for me. But it is a title bit into the future.

“Right now, I am hoping to pile up some points in the coming Linares tournament. I felt encouraged by the way I am playing and improving upon my game. I think I should do like this more often because it is in tournaments that I get lot of my work done. I would like to play a lot of tournaments next year,” Anand, the Indian icon of the of the elite game of 64-squares, said.

Vishy, who was felicitated for retaining the World Cup title in Hyderabad last week by the Tamil Nadu Chess Association of which the chess prodigy is a life member, said, “The Hyderabad World Cup was a strong field and its strength could be gauged by the fact that strong players like Vassily Ivachuk and Vladimir Malakohv did not qualify for the tournament proper.”

Vishy said, “I think the point here is there were a few famous and big names in chess. But that gives clear picture of the strength in chess. The tournament was intensively competitive.”

Emphasising that one could not compare the World Cup with the World Championship, he said, “You cannot really compare the World Championship which has 128 players with field of 24 in World Cup. I would still say that Hyderabad tournament was the strongest tournament that was held in its total entirety in Indian soil, where as last year, it was held between Delhi and Teheran.”

Summing up the Hyderabad event, Vishy said he started with a deficit before winning the third and fourth game. “In mind, I came back from a deficit. The third and fourth games put me in run for one of the qualifying spots. In fact, it looked like a three-way tie for two qualifying spots. But it turned out to be a five-way tie. On the last day, Rustam Kasimdzhanov was waiting for the result of Sasikiran's match against Xu Juan and then tie with me for the second spot. All these made the last round very confusing as all our chances of qualifying for the two spots depended on this cycle.”

“After my draw, the only person who could be eliminated was Hamdouchi Hichem, who drew with me and he was half a point behind me. But at the end of the day, I got through to the next round and I felt sort of liberated and played exactly as what happened in the first World Cup. I was just thinking as to how much risk is appropriate in such a situation in the last round game. It went magically with my winning one game and did not need a tie break and then went to win the title.”

PTI