Linares (Spain), Mar 7: World Champion Viswanathan Anand played out an easy draw with Vassily Ivanchuk of Ukraine to maintain his slender half point lead after the penultimate round at the Morelia-Linares chess tournament underway here.

The draw came easy for Anand as Ivanchuk could not do much with his white pieces and when Magnus Carlsen of Norway was also forced to split the point with Levon Aronian of Armenia it meant that the Indian ace goes into the last round with a half point cushion and white pieces to back him.

Barring a disaster in the last round game against former world champion Veselin Topalov of Bulgaria, Anand is assured of at least a shared first place in the category-21 tournament and is likely to retain the title he won last year.

The impact that white pieces have in high level chess was quite evident when Anand was asked about prospects in the event with just one round to come, "tomorrow I have white, and at least I got all these games out of the way and I still keep my lead," Anand said after drawing his game.

While not much happened on the leading boards, Veselin Topalov kept his date with destiny after scoring a hard fought victory over tail ender Peter Leko of Hungary.

The Bulgarian on 7 points is a full point behind Anand but still has a chance to jointly win the title if he can have his way against the Indian ace.

The other game of the day was quite catastrophic for Latvian turned Spaniard Alexei Shirov who simply missed an endgame finesse in a level position and went down to Teimour Radjabov of Azerbaijan.