Viswanathan Anand: My
Career (Volume 1)
Review by Michael Jeffreys
After featuring past world champions
Kasparov and Kramnik on DVDs, Chessbase has come out with a new DVD series
starring the popular Indian World Champion, Viswanathan Anand. This review
covers the first DVD in the series, Viswanathan Anand: My Career (Volume 1),
which highlights Anand’s games from 1984-1999 and has a running time of 3
hours, 48 minutes.
Now 38 years old, “Vishy” was born
in Madras, India on December 11, 1969. He was considered a chess prodigy at a
very young age and talks about his start in chess in the second video clip on
the DVD:
|
Screen shot of Anand
talking about getting started in chess as a young boy |
“My sister found a chess
club nearby when I was 7. It was called the Tal chess club, in Madras. At first
it was pretty intimidating. There was just a bunch of old people playing chess,
but eventually I got the hang of it.
“A few years later my
father got posted in Manila, in the Philippines, in 1979 right after the
Karpov-Korchnoi match in Baguio. There was a 1 hour television show on chess
everyday. My mother would record the game with pen and paper and then play it
over with me when I got home from school. And we would also solve the puzzles.
Eventually I solved so many of the puzzles that they invited me down to the
television station. Each time you solved the puzzle they gave you a free book.
Eventually they told me to come there and take all the books I want, but please
don't enter the puzzle contest anymore!”
Anand comes off as relaxed and seemly
enjoying himself as he talks about his early career. One thing I appreciated
was that he looks directly into the camera while speaking, unlike another
popular Chessbase presenter.
Interestingly, he says that his jump
in strength happened very fast. That one week he was a good, but nothing
special club player, and the next he was winning everything in sight, including
his country’s national junior title. One thing you have to admire about Anand
is that he is not afraid to show his losses, even brutal ones:
|
Screen shot of
Anand going over his game against Kaidanov |
In the above screen shot, Anand is
showing a position from a game between himself and Gregory Kaidanov from Moscow
in 1987. Vishy, playing Black, says that he felt everything was under control
and didn’t see White’s compensation for the piece he had sacrificed. However,
Kaidanov’s next move was a knockout: 1.Qxf7+!! 1-0 And suddenly the game
was over as 1…Rxf7 is met by 2.Ng6+ Kg8 3.Rh8#.
Anand’s openness and honesty on this
DVD is very refreshing. He talks about the trap of getting complacent once you
have achieved your GM title, which he says is what happened to him:
“Okay, so now I am a
grandmaster. And then you get completely stuck. This is something that many
people had warned me about. They said, the first thing you do after getting the
GM title is to have 6 months of lousy results! I think what happens is that you
simply stop having a goal in front of you. First of all, a grandmaster title is
for life; you don’t lose it. The second problem is you used to have a goal in
every tournament; ‘okay, I need 6 1/2 out of 9 to score a GM norm,’ and you
could aim for it, and so you were very motivated. But once you become a GM, you
get complacent. That’s what happened to me in1998… when basically all I achieved
was tossing a hell of a lot of elo points down the drain.”
Wow, great stuff and something I
have not heard discussed before by any GM, let alone a world champion. I found watching
Vishy go through several technical rook endings in the beginning of the DVD quite
instructive. And when he shows his first win over Kasparov at Tilburg in 1991, you
can feel Anand’s satisfaction (and rightly so!).
Other interesting games on the DVD
include: Anand - Kamsky, Las Palmas 1995, PCA-Candidates Final, 9th Game; Anand
- Gelfand, Wijk aan Zee 1996; Anand - Ivanchuk, Las Palmas 1996; Anand -
Shirov, Dos Hermanas 1997; and Kramnik - Anand, Belgrad 1997.
While there is much to like on this
DVD, I do have a few minor criticisms:
Sometimes Anand rapidly clicks
through a game while saying, “This is not interesting.” Well, if it’s not
interesting, why show it? Why not just have the positions you wish to talk
about already set up?
Also, he doesn’t tell you what color
he is playing at the start of the games, so you either have to look at the game
score in the window or wait until he says something like, “So now I played…” More
“viewer friendly” would have been to just tell us what color he was playing
before starting to click on the moves.
Finally, several times the poor guy
pulls out a hanky to wipe his forehead (after first apologizing) in several of
the videos because he says it’s so hot in the room… wasn’t there a fan
somewhere they could have gotten him!?
The Bottom Line
Anand’s presentation on this DVD is
both relaxed and enjoyable. His openness in discussing many interesting topics
is both entertaining and refreshing. Besides the few criticisms I listed above,
another that I want to mention is that he doesn’t explain the openings at all,
but rather just clicks through the first dozen moves or so quite rapidly. This
is something that lower rated players may have a problem with. Instead, Anand
mostly focuses on middle games and endings. That said, there is much the viewer
can learn from the likeable world champion. On a scale of 1-10, Viswanathan
Anand, My Career (Volume 1) gets an 8.5
