7/21/2010 – The World Champion Vishy Anand is currently in India, in his home town of Chennai. Relaxing with his iPod and iPad – but also talking to journalists and TV reporters. The finance magazine Forbes is carrying one article after another, tech sites are asking him about mathematics and remote astronomy, and the broadsheets are churning out reports and portraits. Samples and excerpts.
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What Vishy Anand Can Teach You
Viswanathan Anand came back from virtual annihilation and conquered the world.
His life has quite a few lessons on the art of winning. Article by Ashish K
Mishra and S. Srinivasan.
One night in July 2001, world chess champion Viswanathan Anand woke up with
a start at his hotel room in Dortmund, Germany. He had been unable to sleep
off the pain of going through the worst losing streak of his career. He was
hovering at the bottom in the tournament in progress there but more importantly,
his worst fears were just coming true. He was staring at a long phase of poor
form.
The Forbes article describes how Anand's wife Aruna, unable to bear his suffering,
suggest the gym at 4 a.m., then a walk and movies, but nothing worked for Anand,
who had hit rock bottom. He finished last in the tournament with four losses,
six draws and no wins.
Almost a decade later, in April 2010, a group of chess strategists in Bulgaria
was trying to make Anand feel like a loser again. By now, he had gone on to
become the world champion in every format of the game and was playing at top
form even at the age of 40. And that was bad news for the handlers of Veselin
Topalov, who was challenging Anand for the world crown.
The article goes on to describe how Anand survived and triumphed in the 12-game
match played in Topalov’s home territory. And how it all started with
Anand as a shy child prodigy who matured into a methodical player, able to hold
his own against any opponent.
As
he ages, his game has only sharpened. In the last three years, he has been
virtually unbeatable. And despite all this, Anand remains fundamentally a
simple guy, opening the door to visitors and helping his wife in laundry.
The article has a nice story about from 22 years ago:
In 1988, Soviet grandmaster Efim Geller went to the southern Indian city
of Coimbatore to play in a tournament. Geller was a legend and in the twilight
of his career of four decades during which he had beaten other greats such
as Bobby Fischer. But in Coimbatore, he lost to a little-known 18-year-old
boy.
When he went back to Moscow Chess Club, his peers teased him asking, “So
we hear that you lost to a boy in India?” Geller replied, “Boy?
I think I lost to a world champion.” That boy was Viswanathan Anand.
Anand never left anyone in doubt about where he was headed in the game of chess.
Manuel Aaron, India’s first international master and a nine-time national
champion, recalls that even when he saw him for the first time in the 1970s,
Anand exuded a kind of energy and focus that could be described only as world-class.
At the Mikhail Tal Chess Club in Chennai where Aaron guided young players, Anand
was a unique talent. At Aaron’s lectures on the great games of Soviet
chess masters, it was only Anand who asked questions and even suggested alternative
moves. The almost unbearably cute picture above shows Anand at the age of eleven,
winning the Tamil Nadu Championship for the first time.
Viswanathan Anand: Listen to yourself and everything else will follow
In a second Forbes article Anand himself gives chess fans advice on how to
outfox their opponents. Here are some of the bullet points:
I think it is normal because you always have worries and when you are paranoid
you start to sense the problems that could arise.
I had the worst result of my career in the second half of 2001. My confidence
was undermined so much that it took me months to get it back. And at this
stage, I think I tried out almost everything. I tried switching openings,
making a couple of things better, but nothing really seemed to work.
It is only when the tide goes out that you see who is swimming naked. The
one thing I learned is to be objective and make changes before they are
absolutely necessary. If things are going your way for a long time then
there are a lot of things that you have not spotted.
Failure is often a good wake up call. It is like cold water in your face.
The first thing is to see what you have done wrong.
Every once in a while you have to outfox your opponent. I think the risks
that you take and which are enjoyable are those where you are learning new
things about the game and then you want to try it out.
Blind spots may never go away. They remain with you since childhood. You
just get better at covering or masking them over time. But if you are put
under enough pressure, you will make the same mistakes.
It is funny that you are sitting with this other guy and after a while
you can hear him breathing. So when the breathing suddenly stops you know
that he has made a mistake.
The first thing I looked for in my team was that everyone gets along. This
is the biggest part because you are going to be together a lot. And principally
with me! We share everything. We are very open so everything that we work
on belongs to all of us.
Anand with his team during a World Championship match
There are people who say chess is an art, it is artistic and you must do
this and that. But it is primarily a competition where you try to beat your
opponent and if you do it with some dodgy moves, fine.
Here's a nice interview by Techtree with World Champion Vishy Anand, who talks
about his connection to technology – communication, games, remote
astronomy, 3D, the iPad...
Other recent articles
Times
of India: Anand to tackle 40 math wizards simultaneously
"Both chess and mathematics are closely linked and lot of our methodology
in problem solving are similar," said Anand who ranks Andrew Hodges's
'Inner Life of Numbers', a book on 'Fermat's Last Theorem' as among his favourites
and frequently read books.
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