Anand - Gelfand Wrapup

Let's have one last post on the 2012 Anand - Gelfand match. First, it gives me the opportunity to use (with permission) a couple of photos from Eric van Reem's unique record of the match from an insider's point of view.

Photos and captions from the Mate in Moscow blog:

Left: The trophy; creator of the sculpture Andrey Molchanovsky. You can recognize the crown in the chessboard. The trophy is made of gold and bronze, the chessboard of optical glass. It weighs about 8 kg. • Right: Team Anand, Moscow 2012: Peter Heine Nielsen, Aruna Anand, Viswanathan Anand, Rustam Kasimdzahnov, Radek Wojtaszek, Surya Ganguly, Eric van Reem and Hans-Walter Schmitt.

Next, it gives me a place to tie together my various posts on the match. Posts marked '(*)' are from the my main blog Chess for All Ages.

• 2012-05-16: World Championship Chess on TV; see also 2012-05-17: The Man Who Put Chess on Television (*)
• 2012-05-18: When Does the Game Start? (video; *)
• 2012-05-21: Chess Quizzes for Beginners (*)
• 2012-05-23: Anand - Gelfand, Petrosian - Botvinnik
• 2012-05-24: World Championship History as it Happens (*)
• 2012-05-28: Tiebreaks & Quizzes (*)
• 2012-05-30: Anand: 'This match could have gone either way.'
• 2012-05-31: Gelfand: 'Computers have not changed the nature of chess' (*)
• 2012-06-01: India Loves Anand (video; *)
• 2012-06-06: The Way Forward?
• 2012-06-07: Anand's Draw Offer (g.12; *)

Finally, it gives me a reason to analyze the spike in my visitor stats, as I did two years ago in Searching for Amand - Topalon.

The site gets more visitors every time a World Championship is held and I've often wondered where they come from. Since creating the simple database I described [in March 2010], I'm better equipped to do a detailed analysis.

Traffic to my site more than doubled during the duration of the match. Visitors to the page on the 2012 Anand - Gelfand match (linked above) exceeded those to the site's Index Page, which is normally the most visited page in any particular period. About 50% of the traffic came from Google, another 25% from my other pages, the index page in particular, and 5% from Yahoo and Bing each. The other 15% came from various sources. I was pleasantly surprised to see referrals from Wikipedia's page on the Tretyakov Gallery, the site of the match.

Another page that received far more traffic than usual was 1995 Kasparov - Anand PCA Title Match : Highlights. Most of the traffic came from searches on variations of 'Kasparov Anand', although Chessgames.com's page on Viswanathan Anand vs Garry Kasparov; World Championship Match 1995 (game nine) was also a significant source. Game nine was the first decisive game after eight straight draws in the 1995 match. I imagine that many of these visitors were wondering if the six initial draws of Anand - Gelfand were some sort of a record.