The 7th round was played in the 2007 chess world championship yesterday, marking the end of the first half of the tournament. Not that surprisingly, one of the players who was a favorite before the tournament is leading the pack: The world's currently highest rated player, Vishy Anand, won 3 games so far giving him a 0.5 point lead over Gelfand on the second place. The current world champion Kramnik is a full point behind but does not have to worry too much about this because he will get to play a match against whoever will win the current event. I have to admit that I was very disappointed seeing all games drawn in the first round, but fortunately the intensity of the games picked up and there were quite a few interesting games so far. To my relief, nobody started to accuse people of cheating, too, giving hope for a world championship tournament with the focus on chess and not scandals. This, however, will most likely also keep it out of big media.

I did a quick poll among the visitors of SquirrelChess.com, asking if they follow the world championship games live. Most people (45%), including myself, try to follow a few of the games live. However, at least for the ones living in the U.S., game time overlaps with normal working hours, making this a rather sneaky affair in the office. To my astonishment, almost a third of the people taking part in the poll follow most of the games live. I guess this is partly due to the type of audience that spends time visiting chess blogs like mine which probably tends to spend more time online than the average person. In addition, I was surprised to notice that this site ranks also rather high in the Google search results for "chess world championship live" and similar terms, giving me a nice traffic boost lately and most likely also influencing the poll results. Only 17% prefers to 'just' read the news.

Take a look in this forum thread for some links to chess world championship coverage and post your favorite links there.

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