Indian Viswanathan Anand is one of the most incredible chess players in the history of the noble game. His speed on the board is still an unexplained mystery
Madras, South India. The 1970s. The city’s chess club took the name Mikhail Tal, in honor of the former Soviet champion. The place was opened in 1972 by the Russian Cultural Center. Open Monday and Thursday afternoon. On Sunday he did it from the morning. A seven-year-old boy named Viswanathan Anand used to spend hours in the club. “I rushed through school assignments to play as much time as possible,” Anand confesses today. Despite having enough boards and pieces, the regulars created a more dynamic game mode. Two chess players played a five-minute game for each side. The winner kept his place and played against the next rival. On the other side, the loser got up and waited for another turn. “Depending on the number of people,” recalls Anand, “you could stand in line for an hour or an hour and a half. And of course it wasn’t much fun to watch the others’ matches ». If someone won four or five games in a row, “committees” were set up. Committees were consultative groups that helped with the goal of beating the strongest player. Viswanathan Anand was the king of the table. He played thousands of matches under the pressure of the stopwatch. At times he was able to move two plays per second. Thus began the legend of the “Madras Rapid”. The adventure of the “lightning boy”.
Those coffee encounters unconsciously molded Anand into a devilish style of play. But it wasn’t just these sessions that made him one of the fastest players in chess history. There is in him an innate spark of light, a unique and mysterious gift. Anand is the god Murugan of the board. “Is my nature. That’s how I am,” admits Viswanathan. “I usually decide very quickly, because once the game goes through my head, I have to make it to verify that it is indeed the right game. opportunities pass me by from time to time. And I make mistakes. But most of the time it’s my opponent who is very uncomfortable, in a hurry with time, and doesn’t quite understand how I can react to his touch with such speed. The surprising thing is that today, at the age of 53, I retain the same nature.
In 1978, Anand’s father, Krishnamurthy Viswanathan, an engineer with the Southern Railway Company, accepted an offer to work as a consultant in the Philippines. The family moved to Manila for a year. This circumstance was decisive because the Philippines was at that time the epicenter with the most heartbeat of international chess, especially thanks to the pressure of a controversial character, Florencio Campomanes, later president of FIDE. Chess player, political scientist, man of questionable morals, Campomanes belonged to the inner circle of dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Thanks to his influence, Campomanes was able to organize the world championship between Anatoli Kárpov and Víktor Korchnói in the Philippine city of Baguio. The whole country followed each of the games of this game without hesitation. Anand and his family arrived in Manila a few weeks after the championship, but the enthusiasm for chess was still at a fever pitch. The Chess Today program, dedicated to game science, was broadcast on public television. At the end of each episode, viewers were challenged to solve a chess problem. Anand couldn’t watch the show because he was in class. But when he came home, his mother told him everything that had happened and what the challenge was. Vishy Anand, only 9 years old, emailed the solutions to every problem. At that time there were no analysis modules, so we had to use mental calculations, with a board as the only support. «I keep pictures of me and my mother collecting the prizes of the competition. They were chess books. Reading these books, which I still have, helped me a lot in my progress,” recalls Anand. During one of these birth ceremonies, those in charge of the program learned that Anand’s family would soon be returning to India. Then, half jokingly, they asked Vishy to choose as many books as he wanted, but please don’t comment anymore.
The most important person in Anand’s life was his mother, Susheela, a woman who came from a family where chess was always present. “My mom played and my uncles played, even at school,” Vishy confirms. And he adds: “My mother taught me the rules. Seeing me take the board again and again, he found me a club. And later it was she who accompanied me on the journeys to my first tournaments. Anand’s story is similar to Alexander Alekhine’s in this regard, as in both cases it was a female figure who conveyed their passion for the game. “My mother and father gave me their full support to play chess. This trust was very important to me,” admits Anand. On his return to India, Vishy started playing in the youth section of Tamil Nadu. Expectations were met very quickly. Thus, at the age of 15, he became the youngest Indian chess player to earn the title of International Master. His playing strength knew no ceiling. In 1987, fate brought him back to Baguio City, to the gambling hall he visited as a boy with his parents to smell and touch the sacred place where Karpov and Korchnoi had dueled. On that same stage, Viswanathan Anand achieved glory for the first time in his life. Youth World Champion was declared. The prodigy was confirmed.
One of the most impressive features of Vishy Anand is his prodigious memory. In his time, elite chess players discussed the classic games of the legends (Morphy, Steinitz…) and studied the publications of the ‘Šahovski Informator’, a kind of database that helped generations of players organize opening theory and analyze the game from your rivals. . Garri Kasparov said, “We are all children of the Informator.” In these analogous circumstances, Vishy Anand’s memory played an essential role, as it enabled him to classify in his own mental catalog all the information he would later need for a blackboard. I ask Vishy about his powerful retention: “Was it given to you as a pre-chess skill or, on the contrary, did you develop it by playing the game? Do you also remember other types of things, such as where you put the keys, or historical dates? ».
Anand’s answer explains the mystery from a humble and panoramic perspective, without forgetting that in the margins there are some keys that are interesting to understand a little better how the head of an elite chess player works: «My memory is well, it is true, but the amount of information must be taken into account. When I was young I remembered almost every game I played. Also some I read in magazines. But there weren’t that many. Maybe he remembered sixty games. And always thanks to a pattern, an element that made it easier for me to remember the position written on the board. The same happened to me in other areas. There was even a time when he remembered almost all the phone numbers he used. But the volume was equally limited. It helped me establish some internal order, to figure out if a number was somehow repeated or if it was a multiple of another.” And he adds: “Chess has improved my memory because it taught me to practice techniques. If I repeat these techniques in other situations, I can remember almost everything, including where my keys are. [risas]. In any case, I don’t think that chess players generally have a special memory. I know Harry Pillsbury’s feats of memory, they were astounding, but they may have had fewer distractions in ages past. On the other hand, our brains have had to adapt to an immeasurable amount of information at the moment and, more than remembering, they know where to find what they are looking for. That’s how we survive.”
Whether it is because of this innate quality or not, Viswanathan Anand has won the world championship five times and has been number one in the FIDE ranking for many years. In India he is a national hero. Prior to winning his first world title (2000), Vishy was honored with the Khel Ratna Award, his country’s highest sporting honour. His successes have been a source of inspiration for a new crop of young Indian chess players. Everyone wants to be the new Anand. After retaining the championship title against Kramnik, Topalov and Gelfand, he lost the crown to Norwegian Magnus Carlsen in 2013. The defeat had a painful and circular reasoning because it took place in Chennai, the current name of Madras, the land of Vishy. Playing at home turned against them, but according to Anand, there is another story of hope ahead: “I believe that the new generation of Indian players can go a long way in the long run. Chess was born in my country and somehow maybe one day it will return to its roots.
Anand is also an excellent, humble and polite man. He likes listening to Queen and Pet Shop Boys. Read. Watch movies. There was a time when if you saw ‘Terminator’, by sheer chance, you would win the next day’s game. Or the tournament. “I don’t know if this would work now, looking at it on purpose,” he jokes. His desire for curiosity has crossed sixty-four squares and led him to become a big fan of astronomy. Vishy has observed the deep sky in the Atacama Desert. You photographed a supernova in the Whirlpool galaxy (M51). His passion for the stars is so formidable that in 2018 the Minor Planet Center of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Massachusetts decided to name a dwarf planet after him: ‘(4538) Vishyanand’. The planet lies between Mars and Jupiter and takes 1379 days to complete one orbit around the sun. Perhaps this apparent inertia, paradoxically, explains the mystery of Vishy on the board, for while the rest of us mortals make nearly four turns of translation, Vishyanand “needs” only one. It remains an allegory, of course, a somewhat poetic and absurd assumption, I admit, but at the same time it would be nice if it were. After all, Viswanathan Anand plays chess like an alien.
Source: La Verdad
I am David Jackson, a highly experienced professional in the news industry. I have been working as an author at Today Times Live for over 10 years, and specialize in covering the entertainment section. My expertise lies in writing engaging stories that capture readers’ attention and deliver timely information about the latest developments.
