Anand - Carlsen Openings

With the 2013 Anand - Carlsen title match only a few days away, let's look at the openings the two players have used when facing each other.

I extracted the Anand - Carlsen games stored with Anand's TMER 1983-2013 (TMER = Tournament, Match, and Exhibition Record), and copied them to a separate file: Anand - Carlsen PGN 2005-2013. This came to 63 games, including one game they played as members of opposing teams.

Then I separated the games where Anand had White (30 games) from the games where Carlsen had White (33 games). I used these separate files to create the following summary, which also shows the number of times a move was played. For example, Anand has started 25 times with 1.e4, and 5 times with 1.d4. Then I added the summaries back to the original PGN file, making 65 'games' in total.

I hope the summary helps me understand the openings used by the two players in the match.