Interview with Vishy Anand
This interview was conducted by phone on July 6, 2004, during the first
game of the FIDE world championship final between Rustam Kasimdzhanov and Michael
Adams. The transcription sticks very close to the original recording, giving
us a flavour of a chat with the world's number two player.

World number two player Viswanathan ("Vishy") Anand from India
Frederic Friedel: So Vishy, are you watching
Tripoli?
Vishy Anand: Yeah, sure, I go take a look sometimes on the
server. I tune in, and if something interesting is happening I keep watching,
otherwise I tune out and come back later to see what’s happening.
Frederic: Why aren’t you there, playing
in this championship?
Vishy: Well, basically I disagreed with the idea that Kasparov
was seeded to the final and just decided it wasn’t worth playing, that
it was no longer a real world championship and there was no reason to play.
Fred: You would have had a pretty good chance,
though…
Vish: Maybe, maybe not. But I simply could not take part
in the event. In principle once you take part you accept that Kasparov is rightly
seeded above you and that you don’t have a problem with that. Obviously
the organisers committed a lot of other mistakes, especially with regard to
the Israeli players, but well before I knew whether the Israelis would be allowed
to play, or even thought of that aspect yet, I had already made my decision.
F: What do you think of the quality of the games played
so far?
V: The quality is like it always is when you have a huge
mass of games. There were a fair amount of errors, for instance the way Almasi
won against Modiahki [in round one], and how he lost to Kasim [Rustam
Kasimdzhanov], with Vallejo in between – I suppose there were a
lot of mistakes, but there are just too many games to comment on.
But in the end the top seeds, Topalov and Anand…
Wake up Fred, you’re dreaming…
…Topalov and Adams went all the way to the finals, or almost to
the finals. That was pretty convincing.

Veselin Topalov at the FIDE world championship in Tripoli
Yes, Adams went very smoothly, and Topalov, well what can you say, the guy
made nine and a half out of ten (although he should have lost the second game
against Kharlov). He was going through the tournament like hot butter through
a knife…
Like what…?
Okay, the other way around – but even he could trip up unexpectedly,
which is one of the dangers of this format. Suddenly somebody is very solid,
things are not so smooth, and then something like this happens. You simply
forget how to overcome resistance.
But what I am saying is that the knockout system works to a certain degree,
apparently.
Yes, I think that if your nerves are holding up it works, and I don’t
see anything wrong per se in the knockout system. You remember Delhi/Teheran
[FIDE world championship 2000]? There it was me, Adams, Shirov and
Grischuk – I mean not a bad semi. Or take Groningen [FIDE Championship
1997-98] the four semi-finalists were Adams, me, Short and Gelfand, so
it’s always been the case that in the end the top seeds have come up.
You can also say this about events like Monaco and other events, where the
chess looks pretty chaotic, but in the end somehow there are only familiar
names at the top.
If it were left to you, how would you stage a world championship, would
you continue in the same knockout style, or go back to classical chess, or
what?
It’s a very tricky question. I think all systems have their advantages
and disadvantages. The long matches have some attraction to them, but then
again short draws become a big problem, especially now-a-days when everyone
sits down with Fritzy and gets these long, forced lines. I mean in previous
times at least you went to the board and were not completely sure, but now
you can mathematically work some lines out and force a draw. I think the danger
of these 12 or 16 game matches is that you can get an incredible amount of
short draws.
And this is the fault of Fritz?

Anand working with the computer
Yeah, sometimes, definitely, if your preparation goes too well. You’ve
seen the effect in Linares, that is the kind of thing I am thinking about.
People are simply well prepared, they play topical lines, and in fact they
even copy each other’s openings. Somebody who has never played the Sveshnikov
will add it to his repertoire, someone who never plays the Marshall will have
it in his repertoire, and they all play the same lines against each other,
often with reversed colours as well. It is very difficult in those circumstances
to get anything going. Now if that can happen with six players it can also
happen with two. These sixteen-game matches can be very interesting, but they
can also be very boring. And if something fizzles out on one day you don’t
have a second or third game to watch. It becomes better to watch the games
from home than to make a big trip and see a game finish early. And then there
may be a rest day before the next game, and so on. Knockout matches on the
other hand are so unpredictable, it is almost a pity that someone like Topalov
gets kicked out, but one bad day and you are home.
You feel sorry for Topalov?

World championship finalist in Tripoli Rustam Kasimzdhanov
Well, you have to give it to Kasim, it’s not like he did it in just
one day, he proved Topalov’s equal over four games. So I wouldn’t
call it a fluke.
Okay, Vish, but let us say that one day you become FIDE president, or
president of India or something, and you have to select a format for the world
championship. What would you do?
[Thinks] At the moment I would have to say that just getting everybody to
the world championship is half the job. It doesn’t matter which format
you have, the tournament has lost some of its lustre if half the people are
not playing. You have these knockouts, and Kasparov or Kramnik refuses, or
you have some private events where basically everyone else refuses, and on
and on. Let us assume that in a knockout everybody plays. Then the result at
least is valid, even if not everybody is completely happy about the system.
The old championships were not that fair in themselves – I mean the challenger
had to work for three years while the champion just sat there waiting for him.
So we can’t pretend we are coming from some Utopia and switching to the
knockout system.
In the history of these knockout events top players have never played.
At least two or three, sometimes even four didn’t play.
Hmmm… In Groningen it was Kramnik and Kasparov who didn’t play,
Las Vegas was me and Kasparov, in 2000 [Delhi/Tehran] again Kramnik
and Kasparov, in 2001 again the two of them. So basically it was the two guys
who had a match going at that point, only in 1997 Kramnik took off on his own.
But I really think that the main problem is what to do about short draws. You
can have any format you want…
Okay, let's go into that a little more deeply. You are saying that people
tend to prepare very carefully with Fritz and their seconds, and then go out
there with the intention of playing a quick draw?

Not really. But it has become really tough to find a line you can play with
white. I think Kramnik hinted at this after Linares. Unless you have some very
fresh idea, if everyone knows the same lines it is very difficult to do anything
with white. So you come there, make a feeble attempt, and then you go home.
So what do we do about this?
Well, one idea is simply to forbid draw offers until move 30…
But then people would simply shuffle around for a while.
Yeah, but at least maybe while you shuffle around you can make a mistake,
if you have to make another ten or fifteen accurate moves. But of course it
is hard to enforce, and I’ll admit it is quite artificial. The problem
is that a draw is a natural part of the game, and there is only so much you
can do to avoid them. Then again if you keep having tournaments like Linares
this year you could have the sponsors running away as well.
Let’s assume you had to redesign Linares – what would you
do about draws? Would you perhaps try to regulate it with the prize money?
That is one possibility, but in the end I can hardly imagine that losing is
ever going to be more advantageous than a draw. Okay, you can take huge risks,
but then your opponent might try to exploit that. It comes down to something
fundamental. You have to actually redesign the way chess works. We have tinkered
around with quite a lot of different formats. The knockout has at least that
one virtue, that at the end of the day it produces a winner. I don’t
know if a blitz game is any more elegant than a tie-break in tennis, or the
penalties or the golden goal in soccer, but at least it works. Maybe we should
take that from other sports, that at the end of the day somehow you need a
winner, one way or the other, even if chess purists go nuts about the way it
is done.
Speaking about soccer, how about taking their system of awarding
three points for a win and one for a draw?
[Thinks] It’s possible that it would work, and maybe there would be
an incentive to change your style a little bit and play more aggressively the
whole time, so that over ten or fifteen games there are chances that you will
score many more points. For an individual game, if your opponent is willing
to play some really boring position, if he is going to be really solid, there
is nothing really that you can do. But in the long run it may not be a bad
idea.
So it might be a viable alternative?
I don’t know, I think you simply need to have some tests. We are shooting
in the dark. When you tinker around with these things you will discover that
all kinds of unexpected problems appear, so I think we need to have a few tournaments
and try this out. Another thing would be just to mix the field much more. Tournaments
with broad fields like Wijk aan Zee are always much more interesting than a
much more narrow tournament like Linares.
But in Wijk you guys tend to draw against each other and crush the weaker
opposition…
That is not completely true. If you look at this year, my game against Kramnik
wasn’t a quick draw, we were actually playing a full game. My game against
Leko was quite interesting, Kramnik tried hard against Leko, Adams beat Kramnik.
And of course I don’t want to say that a tournament like Linares is always
going to be boring. But quite often you have these very high draw percentages,
which happens more when you have just six or four players of equal strength.
The problem is also that the same players meet each other so often, they know
each other very well, so it is very difficult to add something new. You take
these old guys – I’m one of them – and bring in a bunch of
Radjabov, Carlsen, people like that, and maybe you get a more interesting field.
Mix that with an organiser who is there, watching and pressing…
Like Rentero…
[the legendary organiser of Linares, who would yell at and threaten players
who took quick draws, and pay out bonus sums in cash to those who played fighting
games]

Anand vs Leko (in Dortmund 2003). Must such games necessarily end in a
draw?
Yeah, some Rentero type of guy. I used to sometimes think he was overdoing
it, but now I can see that he was onto something. I don’t want to say
that Wijk is interesting and Linares not, but tournaments with a very small
field and always the same players make it difficult to do something interesting.
I think you need to mix the field a lot these days.
What about team championships, where people travel halfway round the world,
meet someone they know well and play a quick draw? Isn’t that also counter-productive?
I guess you are referring to my game against Kramnik in France? I wouldn’t
say this is something that is typical for team tournaments, it happens everywhere
else. For example in France Kramnik played the Anti-Marshall, I found this
move Ne3, which was an improvement on his game from the previous day, and actually
it created interesting possibilities for White. But right the next move I made
a mistake, and then the position completely fizzled out. It is in the nature
of these openings, like the Sveshnikov or the Anti-Marshall, that you make
just one inaccurate move and the position just fizzles out. We could have plodded
on for a while, but essentially the game is dead. It’s something very
fundamental in chess.
You said something very intriguing, that we cannot get rid of the problem
of draws without tweaking the game itself. How could we do that?
[Thinks] Well, if we used your suggestion of counting three points for a win
and one for a draw then maybe people would start playing riskier lines because
in the long run it is more productive. That’s one possibility. Another
idea is what Kramnik brought up, which is to predetermine the opening and give
them to the players a couple of hours or a day before the game. That way you
force them to play a much broader range of things. I think we simply have to
try it. These proposals sound nice, but we simply have to see whether they
work. In Buenos Aires I recall we had this Sicilian tournament – if you
force everyone to play the Sicilian you should be guaranteed a fairly interesting
tournament, but even there in some variations play became extremely interesting,
in other variations it was quite boring, because people didn’t play the
main line. So that even here people can get used to different openings.

Kramnik (left) has suggested predetermining openings in top tournaments
I must say that in the end there is some merit to knockout. The idea to have
knockout events didn’t come out of a vacuum. It came because of this
problem of short draws, which is not a problem that developed in the last four
years – it just got a fresh leash of life recently.
If you close your eyes tightly and concentrate, can you imagine playing
in Linares and the openings you have to play is given to you, on the evening
before or in fact on the day of the game?
Yeah, I could get used to the idea. In general I’m always quite happy
to try new formats.
But how would we choose the openings? Wouldn’t you be upset if I
gave you the King’s Gambit to play, for example?
Yes, but you could give it to both players. Maybe every once in a while you
come across a dud, but by the end of the tournament the duds should be evenly
distributed.
Maybe there could be two rapid games on a day, where you play each side
of a predetermined opening against the same player.
That may be an idea, or simply have an Internet vote on which openings must
be played. The whole idea is to attract spectators, so you might as well have
a vote on which opening people want to see. What you can’t have is theoretical
experts deciding which lines are interesting. You need something more broad-based.
You just have to accept the risk that there are going to be duds, and just
hope that they are fairly distributed.
What about the idea of shuffling the pieces in the opening?

Shuffling the pieces – the future of chess? (GM Dautov playing "Chess960")
That has obviously arisen as a result of the same problem. But that is also
quite random, sometimes you get very interesting games, but sometimes your
pieces are quite illogically placed and there is absolutely nothing happening.
We have to build up a lot of experience before we can decide which setups are
the most interesting.
Okay, let's go back to Tripoli. What do you think of Kasimdzhanov? You
know him quite well?
I think he has been very smart in this tournament. His record is the most
impressive – I mean Ivanchuk, Grischuk, Almasi and Topalov. The way he
beat Chucky, well that was perhaps a Chucky thing, but the way he did it against
Grischuk in the rapids was quite impressive. And you notice that he generally
wins in the first two rapid games. He seems to have very good nerves.
Actually he is known for NOT having good nerves…
Yeah, it’s a funny thing. In Tripoli he really seems to be in his groove.
In fact I wouldn’t even consider Adams a huge favourite or anything.
Adams hasn’t had a tiebreak so far, so if they go to a tiebreak Kasim
will perhaps be more warmed-up.

Anand at the FIDE world championship In Groningen and Lausanne in 1997/98
(video stills from the multimedia report in ChessBase Magazine 68)
You know it’s funny, but when I played Mickey in Groningen [1997]
he had been having to play a tiebreak in every round. He had a huge tiebreak
against Van Wely, a tiebreak against Svidler, he played a tiebreak against
Short, which went the entire distance. At the same time I had been going smoothly
from round to round – I beat Shirov, Gelfand, Almasi and Nikolic without
a tiebreak, and had just one tiebreak against Khalifman, which of course you
will remember. But in general things had gone very smoothly, and I remember
spending a very pleasant rest day over Christmas, on the day when Short and
Adams were playing their long tiebreak. At some stage in the evening I got
a phone call saying okay, it’s Adams. It would seem that I was fresh
and relaxed, but right on the first day I had big problems, and after that
I could have won each of the remaining games, but only for a brief moment,
and when that moment passed it was gone. So it was a very tough match, and
we went to the tiebreak, which went the whole distance. It was absolutely nerve-wracking.
I missed chances in the regular games, he missed chances in most of the rapid
games – quite often I though oh my god I’ve blown this –
but somehow I’d get a draw, and only in the fifth game I prevailed. But
the point I’m making is that it seemed to make no difference whatsoever
that one side was fresh and the other tired.
So what is your tip for the final result in Tripoli?

Rustam Kasimdzhanov vs Michael Adams in Tripoli
It’s difficult to say. For instance today I think Kasim is equalising
without any problems, and I’m assuming it will be a short draw [it
was, half an hour later], and they will both settle in nicely. We’ll
have to see how the match goes. I really can’t pick a favourite at this
point.
So you don’t sit there watching these games and regretting that
you are not part of it?
No, not at all. I watch because the games are interesting, with so
many strong players. But I don’t feel I should be there. No.
So what are you doing instead?
Sort of getting ready for Dortmund and enjoying the break. Because I have
a crowded second half of the year. I’m playing Dortmund, Mainz, then
a rapid tournament in Brazil, then I’ll play in the Olympiad in Mallorca,
then probably Corsica, and some Bundesliga matches as well.
So you are doing fine and enjoying life, even without Tripoli…
Oh yes, very much so. For me it is just a very interesting tournament to watch,
I have no regrets about it.