It's the world champion vs the World No1.
Viswanathan Anand shakes hands with Magnus Carlsen

Vishwanathan Anand draws Game 3 with Magnus Carlsen on Tuesday.

The world champion vs the World No1; the King vs the Crown Prince. This is the chess battle of this century.

The World Chess Championship unfolds at Hotel Hyatt Regency as history is in the making over the next three weeks.

If Carlsen wins, he would herald a new era in World Championship. If Anand wins, he would be rated along with Garry Kasparov as the most successful world champion in modern chess.

World champion Viswanathan Anand will start with black pieces in the first game.

The first game will be played on Saturday, followed by the second on Sunday with Carlsen having black. The games will start at 3 pm at Hotel Hyatt Regency, the venue of the championship.

There will be a rest day after the second, fourth, sixth, eighth, 10th, 11th and 12th games. After the sixth game, the colours will be reversed so Anand would have black in the sixth and seventh games.

The players are fighting for a purse of $3 million with the winner standing to earn $1.45m and the loser just under $1m. Carlsen has already pocketed $137,000 of the prize fund for agreeing to play on his opponent’s home turf.

The time control for the 12 games will be: 40 moves in two hours for each player, the next 20 moves in one hour and 15 minutes for the rest of the game, with an increment of 30 seconds per move starting after move 61.

If the match goes into tiebreakers after a 6-6 tie in Classical chess, there will be a four 25-minute rapid chess games to break the tie. If that also ends in a tie, blitz chess mini-matches of two games each will be played. If the first set ends in a tie, the second, third and fourth will follow. In all five sets (10 games) will be played to break the tie.

Even then if the match is tied, the Armageddon (sudden death game) will be applied. In that game, white will get five minutes and black four but black needing only a draw to win the game and match. The rapid, blitz and Armageddon will have separate draw of lots to choose the colour.

The chief arbiter for the championship is, Ashot Vardapetyan from Armenia the same official who was in charge of the Anand-Boris Gelfand World championship match in 2012 in Moscow.