Viswanathan Anand shocked by Wang Hao, finishes joint 3rd

World champion Viswanathan Anand suffered a shocking last-round defeat against Wang Hao of China and had to be content with a joint third finish at the 75th Tata Steel Chess tournament here.

Having done decently so far, Anand ran out of steam in the last round and was outplayed by Wang Hao. Anand remained at sixth spot in the world rankings and stands to gain seven rating points from his efforts here.

Magnus Carlsen of Norway completed the formalities of winning the crown after surviving a scare against Anish Giri of Holland. Carlsen was pushed to the wall but salvaged a half point to match Garry Kasparov's best ever 10 points out of a possible 13 in this tournament.

Levon Aronian of Armenia ended second on 8.5 points after a draw with out-of-sort Fabiano Caruana of Italy. Anand with eight points in all tied for the third spot with the other winner of the day – Sergey Karjakin of Russia.

After a spate of draws in the last round Peter Leko of Hungary finished fifth on 7.5 points, a half point more than Hikaru Nakamura of United States who played out a draw with P Harikrishna in his final round game.

Harikrishna finished seventh on 6.5 points in the 14-player round-robin event and is set to become the third Indian after Anand and K Sasikiran to enter the 2700 rating club post his performance here.

For the records, Anish Giri, compatriot Loek Van Wely and Wang Hao tied for the eighth spot on six points while Chinese girl Yifan Hao ended 11th with 5.5 points in all.

Caruana, on five points, ended 12th while the Dutch duo of Erwin L'Ami and Ivan Sokolov ended on last two spots with four and three points respectively.

Anand faced the Scotch four Knights opening by Wang Hao widely known to give black a level position. However, it was a bad day in office for Anand when nothing went right.

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