Knight Rider: What makes Viswanathan Anand’s game unique
Garry Kasparov once said: ‘My win doesn't reflect how difficult and psychologically draining the match has been.’ See why the greats speak of Anand in this way.
The first international chess tournament was held in London in 1851.
For over a century, it seemed unlikely that an Indian would make a career in the game.
The Russians were too strong. There was little by way of elite training, even elite-chess literature in India. If one wished to reach the highest levels, one had to travel, play against the best, expand one’s view of how the game was played and understood. And before liberalisation, it was far from easy to do any of that.
It would take a wizard to change how chess was viewed here, in the modern age, and that wizard turned out to be Viswanathan Anand.
In 1985, at 15, he became India’s youngest-ever national chess champion (a record that has since been broken). In 1987, he was crowned world junior champion. In 1988, he became India’s first grandmaster, the first Indian to achieve an Elo rating of more than 2500.
By this point, his name was being spoken around the world. Here at home, he had become an idol, an icon, a magic-maker.
Chess and India shared a strange relationship at this point. There is a story that Anand likes to narrate about a train journey from Chennai to Kochi in 1988.
“The elderly gentleman next to me asked what do I do,” he says. “I said ‘I’m a chess player’. He said, ‘But no, what do you do?’ I told him I was a pro chess player. Finally, he said: ‘Young man, if you don’t mind my giving you some advice, sports is a very unpredictable, risky career. If you were Viswanathan Anand, you could make a living from chess but otherwise it will be quite a ride’.”
He did happen to be Anand, and it still was quite a ride. Between 1987 and 1995, when he mounted his first serious bid for the senior crown, the Lightning Kid decided to “grow up”. He bought ChessBase, a state-of-the-art software program that lets users analyse their own and others’ games.
“He is one of the most magnificent players. When I first played him, I was beating him, but rather than get down, he used each loss as a lesson,” says the Soviet-Israeli grandmaster Boris Gelfand, who first played Anand in 1989 and would eventually win the Chess World Cup in 2009. “Yes, he had the talent, but then so did many others. It was his ability to learn that set him apart... that is what has allowed him to have a long career. You could spot a weakness now but play him a little later and it would be gone.”
A big world title clash against the Russian great Garry Kasparov in 1995 would be a turning point. Everything about this game was larger-than-life. The match was played on the 107th floor of the World Trade Centre in New York. The prize was $1.5 million dollars. It was televised live, on ESPN.
At the halfway point, it looked like Anand had a shot. He even won Game 9. But in Game 10, the Russian unleashed the Sicilian Dragon defence with such mastery that the Indian grandmaster simply fell away after that.
Kasparov won with 10.5 points to Anand’s 7.5, to retain the world title.
“Anand’s seconds have made the mistake of over-preparing him for this contest,” Kasparov would say in his post-tournament analysis. “They have prepared him to play me, rather than preparing him to play the style of chess that best suits him, and letting him play to his strengths. Anand is a natural, intuitive player, but the way he has been prepared, his natural brilliance and marvellous talent have been pushed into the background and the emphasis has been on overly rigorous theoretical preparation. Anand is at his best when allowing his creativity free flow.”
He added: “My win does not reflect how very difficult and psychologically draining the match has been for me.”
After that loss, Anand went back to work, with new lessons. He became the FIDE World Champion in 2000, won the Chess World Cup in 2000 and 2002. In 2007, aged 37, he won again, a title he convincingly defended against former world champion Vladimir Kramnik (another Russian) the following year.
“I always considered him to be a colossal talent, one of the greatest in the whole history of chess,” Kramnik said in an interview with ChessBase in 2012. “Each champion has had some sort of speciality, and his is creating counterplay in any position out of absolutely nowhere. He’s got an amazing ability to constantly stretch himself so that even in some kind of Exchange Slav he nevertheless manages to attack something and create something. He also plays absolutely brilliantly with knights, even better than Morozevich – if his knights start to jump around, particularly towards the king, then that’s that, it’s impossible to play against and they’ll just sweep away everything in their path.” His reference is to the uniquely consistent ways in which Anand keeps his opponents unsettled, unusual even among grandmasters.
This was, in many ways, peak Anand. Gelfand, who would take on the Indian for the world crown in 2012, says he felt like he was playing a different player.
“When I had first played him, you could see that there were some positional weaknesses in his play. But by the time I played him in 2012, those weak points had simply evaporated. If he was 7/10 or 8/10 earlier, by 2012, he was 10/10,” he adds.
And then, for a while, it seemed like Anand was done. Except he wasn’t. In 2018, the 49-year-old Lightning Kid won the World Rapid title, surprising himself and the world.
“I [have] won many world rapid titles but recently I had the feeling it was slipping away,” Anand said, the day after. “Honestly, I came here hoping for a good performance. I was not even thinking I could win.”
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