Viswanathan Anand

Viswanathan Anand (born December 11, 1969), known popularly as "Vishy", is an Indian chess Grandmaster and former World Chess Champion. Anand was the first Indian to win the FIDE World Chess Championship in 2000 and since then he has won this Championship in 2007, 2008, 2010 and 2012. He remained the undisputed World Champion from 2007 to 2013. Anand was the FIDE World Rapid Chess Champion in 2003, and is widely considered the strongest rapid player of his generation. In the World Chess Championship 2013 he lost to challenger Magnus Carlsen. He is, all in all, a great chess player.

Quotes

Being the undisputed world champion is a relief. We instituted a unified chess title, I am the absolute world champion.
- Quotations by 60 Greatest Indians. Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology.

To become a world chess champion.
- At the age of six when some one asked him as to what he wanted to become.

When I first visited Moscow in the late 1980s, I was so intimidated. I thought I could be checkmated by every cabdriver.
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But perhaps they were thrown off by my playing style, which was intuitive-and perhaps a little influenced by Vodka. I ran away with the match early. The result was overwhelmingly in my favour: four wins, five draws and only one loss –an annihilation. The Russians were stunned . I was pretty surprised myself.
- On his match against Alexey Dreev held at Chennai in 1991. page=291.

...in 2000, when I defeated Alexei Shirov at the World Chess Championship in Teheran to become the first Indian ever to win the title.
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Since the 1990s technology has taken some of the sheen off the Russian trainers and their methods.
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One of the things I bring to my play is my Indian identity – my ability to shrug off a loss as destiny and hope for better tomorrow. I am often described as a “natural” or “intuitive player”.
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I learned to play fast without agonizing about strategy or overanalyzing individual moves
- After he started playing “blitz” (the shortest format of Chess) in Chennai in early years, pages=292-293

I have what I think is an extremely Indian relationship with God....In Moscow before the tie breaker of the World Championship in May 2012, I again entreated God:Just stay on my side of the board.
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As a young kid sprouting a wispy moustache, I was sometimes dismissed by the Russians as an upstart. I have been referred to even as a “coffeehouse player”
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When I started out, Indians did not have much interest in chess…Now India seems to spawn new chess academies every day.
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My dream is chess played in every school in India. The Soviets would include a chessboard along with the bride’s trousseau to ensure that the children born of that marriage knew the rules of chess.
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I started at the age of six. My elder brother and sister were dabbling a bit, and then I went to my mother and pestered her to teach me as well.

What happens to you at the board begins to feel like it's happening to you in person.

When you lose, you really feel a sense of self … You actually feel that you are being taken apart, rather than just your pieces.

A [world title] match has that feeling much more strongly because it's the same guy doing it over and over and over … When you play a single person, it becomes narrower because you are so focused on each other. It is a lot more personal.

You would have to sit at the board and sweat and feel the fear of defeat or the nearness of victory to understand what goes through a player's head … If you think it's that easy, switch off the computer and try and figure out a few moves on your own.

Anything unusual that you can produce has quadruple, quintuple the value, precisely because your opponent is likely to do the predictable stuff, which is on a computer.

I can relate to many of the emotions they describe...But personally I just like to get on with the job of playing chess. I understand that if I win, I'm probably crushing my opponent's ego but it's not like I do that with great satisfaction. So I don't really look for conflict around the game … It's true that someone like Kasparov has this sense of history, and I'm talking world history rather than chess history. He has a sense of himself being in it, which, for me, is very hard to understand or even relate to in any way.

Age is part of it. For instance, I recognise that [Carlsen] is going to do certain things because he's 22 and there are certain things I can do because I'm 43.

After he lost the World Chamionship to Magnus Carlsen "Magnus Carlsen package too much for me, Viswanathan Anand says". The Times of India. 1 December 2013.

I felt I had I worked hard enough and I felt confident I had done the right kind of work and the right amount of work. But when you talk of preparations, the measure of success is whether it works or not. In that area, I failed completely. I did not stay the course. When you hit the right spot, the sweet spot, it feels great and you feel the preparations have been ideal, but I never got there.

Magnus has many good qualities... he is very versatile and he can play a lot of positions at a very high level. He's also very flexible. And he has this amazing talent for grinding on, as you say. So that combination I was unable to deal with.

I wasn't expecting him to be a gracious, so fair enough. The winner can say anything when he wins... so I guess we will just have to swallow it for now.

In one sense Vishy has everything to gain and nothing to lose. If he beats Magnus, people are going to say, 'my God, he really is one of the all-time greats!' and, if he loses, they will say, 'well, if only the ages had been reversed.
- Jonathan Rowson, British chess champion quoted in "Game of thrones with world chess champion Viswanathan Anand"

It's going to be important for him to start ducking and weaving and playing different positions.
- British grandmaster Nigel Short during 2013 championship quoted in "Game of thrones with world chess champion Viswanathan Anand"

He must make sure Magnus is out of his comfort zone, he needs to direct the positions. It needs to be a mess. He needs to get Magnus into a brawl.
- Lawrence Trent during 2013 championship quoted in "Game of thrones with world chess champion Viswanathan Anand"

Wikipedia

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Viswanathan Anand