94. For winning the right to play Karpov, who was Fide World Champion.

Of course, in the later match for PCA, for the rights to play Kasparov, Anand did beat Kamsky. But that was in regulation games.

Thank you.

OK, why then seconds are "locked up" in a hotel? Does it simply show that players who do so are paranoid? Or is it a valid necessary precaution? If your opponent plays perfectly in middle games, I would revise my strategy and consider drawing unless I could take him out of theory without risk. In that sense, I would think Anand perfectly devised his strategy. These are some very basic "what if" scenarios you take into account. Don't you think?

I think locking people up is called "false imprisonment" and is illegal in the US. I can't believe that you condone that!

As for taking out your opponent... well... that's illegal too and just wrong!

Unless of course you are talking about boxing in which case I will repeat again what I told proloy - if you go to the scorecards you never know what will happen. It's much better to go for the KO and as the great Emmanuel Steward says "Get that *** out of here!"

hmm.. But do not jury gets "locked up" sometimes??

Guess what? The chess world must be mighty confused now with this Anand's draw offer! Because..

If Anand wins tie breaks, he will continue to be the regular World Chess Champion. If he has to lose unfortunately, he will still be the undefeated Steinitz Line World Chess Champion FOREVER! 90% of chess population will refuse to not accept Anand the real Chess Champion.

With this confidence, Anand can go and knock Gelfand out in the rapids!

Where did you get that 90% number? You mean Josh won't accept it, don't you?

Well, in Moscow, which is not quite in the US or its vicinity, this thing may be considered "real imprisonment" and might not, therefore, be illegal.

I think that it is better to have some tiebreak criteria decided beforehand (such as first win, draw odds, or most wins with black for example) that will decide who wins in the event of a tie, than to resort to faster time controls.
The first win criteria would be fair- as neither side would know who will win first beforehand- apart from the player who gets white first, but that is much weaker advantage than draw odds. It would also encourage a player to play on in a slightly better position trying to get that first win.
If you want to give draw odds to a player- why not just toss a coin- it is better than mixing it with rapid/blitz. But toss a coin for first white in my first win tiebreak method is a much smaller advantage.

Finally I would like to say draw odds is like give the player an extra x for 0<x<1 on their score, while the first win idea would effectively make the first win worth 1+x.

OK, all the games might be drawn so that there is no first win! It nearly happened this time, but it never has actually happened- but with the shorter matches it may well happen in the future.

In this case maybe the one who had first black gets the advantage of draw odds neutralising his disadvantage!

The idea of trying to discover tie-break criteria within the match itself is a non-starter. It'll never succeed. It's a contradiction in terms.

If one is indeed obsessed with finding some "other" criteria than the current one, the following too are equally valid nonsensical ideas:

1) The person who took the least amount of time for all his moves, wins
2) The person who castled the fewest number of times in the match, wins
3) The person who offered the most number of sacrifices (pawns, pieces, exchanges), wins
4) The person who played the most number of different openings, wins
5) The person who promoted a pawn the most number of times, wins

and so on...

All of these could arguably have a very "classical-ey" feel to them, and also encourage more active play and winning attempts. But they are all bogus, just like the arbitrary scheme of giving the draw-odss to the one who wins first.

First of all, the idea is based on an wholly unsubstantiated premise that such a draw-odds scheme encourages one to play for a win. I have no idea who or what study has proven that it'll actually not promote preventing the opponent from getting a first win at all costs. Which is basically, an overwhelming encouragement for drawish play.

Secondly, as already noted, if there are no decisive games, then the tie-break too is defunct.

The chess world championship should be geared towards finding who the best chess player is. Not necessarily who the best classical chess player is. That title of Classical World Champion was nothing more than a Kramnik invention, simply because a BGN World Champion didn't quite have a mouth-filling quality to it. And what were the tie-break criteria for the Kasparov-Kramnik match too? -- did Kasparov have draw-odds...? Kramnik for sure had that against Leko.

Every sport has a tie-break, which is an accelerated version of the same basic game, be it football, tennis, hockey, cricket or what have you. There is hardly much reason to be too squeamish about it in chess. Rapid and blitz chess are not random events. That argument is thoroughly demolished by the fact that it's the usual suspects from the classical chess arena who also dominate rapids and blitz -- like Carlsen, Anand, Aronian, Ivanchuk, Kramnik, Kasparov, Leko, Gelfand, Grischuk etc. There isn't any overly gross discrepancy between Fide ratings, and the enthusiast-created Rapid/Blitz ratings. The idea that it is roulette wheel or coin-toss is complete bunkum, unless one considers as normal that only the same set of roulette players will win no matter who participates. That's a very novel description of chance.

That said, if one really doesn't prefer a rapids/blitz tie-break, then we must consider extra-time games of two classical games at a time. Say, if a 12-game match is tied, another two games get played. If that too is tied, another two are played. If at the end of the total sixteen such games too the challenger is unable to defeat the champion, the title stays with the champion. Nobody would question the validity of it.