Quotes of the Day
Over the course of several hours in his Chennai home, Viswanathan "Vishy" Anand has held forth on Mitt Romney's chances of becoming President, the fate of the euro and the intricacies of Spain's "tiki-taka" soccer style. We've also talked about how he became — and has stayed — the world champion in the most cerebral game mankind has ever invented. Throughout the conversation, Anand has been cool, measured and unhurried. But now the afternoon has taken a surreal turn, and he's leaning forward in his chair, waving his hands and making faces. The smartest man I've ever met is acting out scenes from ... Ali G.
Yes, Anand is a huge fan of Sacha Baron Cohen's famously cretinous hip-hop persona. As he enthusiastically describes Ali G's most idiotic japes, I note the sign on the door to Anand's office, the sanctum where he sharpens his mind by poring over tens of thousands of chess games on his laptop computers and plots his continued dominance of the sport of geniuses. A gift from his wife Aruna, it is an homage to Ali G's first movie: VISHY IS INDAHOUSE. "It reminds me that you can't take everything seriously all of the time," he says. "You have to let yourself laugh."
Anand has plenty to laugh about. In May he retained his world title in Moscow by beating Israeli challenger Boris Gelfand. Anand has been undisputed champion since the end of the chess world's great schism in 2007, when competing titles were unified. Considered a national treasure in India, he may be the world's only chess grandmaster who risks being mobbed in the streets. That level of fame carries rewards. Anand endorses products and services ranging from cookies to computer chips to software training. These days there's plenty of money: his take from beating Gelfand alone was $1.4 million. And his personal life couldn't be in a better place. A year ago, shortly after he and Aruna moved back to Chennai, following a long stay in Spain, they had their first child. "This is the life I've been working for," Anand says. "I'm contented."
But to be king of the board is to wear a thorny crown: the chess world has long been a prickly place, where the size of a player's intellect is often matched only by the dimensions of his ego. Anand's victory over Gelfand was greeted by a chorus of criticism from current and former greats, including Garry Kasparov and British grandmaster Nigel Short. Their complaint: Anand and Gelfand played too conservatively, taking too few risks. Ten of the 12 games were draws, and after both players won one game each, the match was decided by a series of four rapid-fire tiebreakers, with each player getting 25 minutes, plus 10-second increments for every move. Three of those games were draws too. Before the match, Kasparov suggested that Anand was lacking motivation and "sliding downhill." Afterward, Short accused him of playing "middle-aged chess."
Grand Old Master
Anand, who has a reputation for being even-tempered during play and nonconfrontational off the board, has been stung by the criticism. Uncharacteristically, he snapped back at Kasparov, accusing the former world champ of sour grapes. "He's obviously been missing the limelight. Maybe he should not have quit chess [in 2005]," Anand tells me, echoing a sentiment he has expressed several times since May. "He's been trying to persuade every taxi driver in Moscow that I should retire as well." (Kasparov declined to be interviewed for this article.)
But Short's jab about Anand's age may be a more telling blow. At 42, the Indian is undoubtedly long in the tooth for a modern chess champion, old enough to be the father of Norwegian Magnus Carlsen, 21, who tops the ratings compiled by FIDE, the World Chess Federation. (The FIDE ratings are based on tournament play and, as in tennis, allow players to be ranked higher than the reigning world champion.) Eight others in the top 10 are substantially younger than Anand, including Russia's Sergey Karjakin (22); Azerbaijan's Teimour Radjabov (25); and Armenia's Levon Aronian (29), ranked second. Only Ukraine's Vassily Ivanchuk, ranked ninth, is a shade older than the champion.
While Anand's ability to stay champion at his age is impressive — analogous to 41-year-old Pete Sampras' winning this month's U.S. Open or 57-year-old Greg Norman's winning next year's Masters — his form has indeed slipped in recent years; Anand has fallen five places behind Carlsen on the FIDE rankings.
Anand says he's aware of his young challengers, and he expects Carlsen or Aronian to be across the board when he defends his title in 2014. But if the young guns want his title, they're going to have to take it from him: retirement, Anand says, is not an option. For one thing, he enjoys the competition too much. For another, he suggests it would be disrespectful to walk away now. "There are people killing themselves to get to where I am. How can I just quit?"
National Hero
Even leaving aside his idiosyncratic taste in entertainment, Anand defies every stereotype of a global chess champion. His persona — easygoing and understated — is the antithesis of his most famous predecessors. He has none of Bobby Fischer's manic intensity, nor Anatoly Karpov's icy, inexorable drive, nor Kasparov's thrusting self-confidence. Anand came of age when the chess world was freighted with politics as well as ego: the titanic contests between the state-backed Karpov and the renegade Kasparov made chess interesting even to those of us who'd never moved beyond checkers.
The sport was dominated by players from the Soviet Union, where the state nurtured talented players from childhood through championship. In contrast, India — where chess was essentially invented — had no meaningful support system. Until Anand came along, the country didn't have a single player who had attained grandmaster status. (The title is awarded by FIDE using an appropriately complex system of competitions and results to measure a player's ability.) So when Anand became the junior world champ at age 17 in 1987 — he made grandmaster the following year — he was almost entirely self-taught. The youngest of three children of a midranking civil servant, Anand learned the game from his homemaker mother and a TV program about chess in the Philippines, where his father was briefly posted.
From the earliest days of his career, Anand's strength was his speed. Christened the Lightning Kid by headline writers, he flourished in what is known as quick chess or blitz chess, in which players are allowed as little as 15 minutes each, plus a few additional seconds per move. Most blitz-chess games last less than an hour, which is light speed by the snail-pace standards of traditional chess. Historically dismissed as a novelty, blitz chess was perfect for TV and grew in popularity; Anand's career blossomed with it.
Still, traditionalists complained that the rapid format couldn't equal "classical" chess, and when Anand made it to the championship match against Kasparov in 1995, he was expected to lose. He did, but not before holding the champion to eight straight draws and then beating him in the ninth game. "It showed everyone I was not just about speed," Anand says. He still played faster than most grandmasters, though. "I found that taking extra time didn't give me extra value," he says. Three years later, he faced Karpov for the championship and forced the match into a rapid playoff, which he lost.
When Anand finally got the crown in 2000, in Tehran, the chess world was in the middle of a schism: Russian Vladimir Kramnik was named classical champion by a rival body to FIDE. It didn't matter to the Indian grandmaster's fans back home, though. In a country historically short on individual sporting success, Anand's achievement was especially prized because it came in a sport that requires brains, not brawn. He was the ideal champion for an India that was making its name in the world as a supplier of whip-smart computer engineers. His endorsement deal with NIIT, which operates hundreds of computer schools across the country, made perfect sense.
The euphoria only grew when Anand beat Kramnik in 2007 to become champion of the reunified chess world. (Kramnik recently described his conqueror as "a colossal talent, one of the greatest in the whole history of chess.") He would defend the title twice — against Kramnik and Bulgarian Veselin Topalov, both of whom are five years his junior — before coming up against Gelfand, who's a year older. "I told Boris, 'Finally, I get to be the younger man,' " he says. (Challengers typically play one another in a tournament format, with the winner getting to take on the world champion in a final match.)
Anand dismisses my suggestion that their combined age, 85, may have mellowed the quality of play. If the match against Gelfand seemed cautious, he says, it was because his opponent had answers for Anand's stratagems. "Those who complain are being disrespectful of Boris," he says. "They're not giving him enough credit for being incredibly well prepared."
Indeed, Gelfand came very close to dethroning the king when he won Game 7. "I had thought that I'd blown it," Anand says. "I wondered what it would feel like to lose the title." During a sleepless night, he wondered whether those who said he was too old were right. "It crossed my mind," he admits. He was still gloomy in the morning, when he met his team of "seconds" — four grandmasters who were helping him prepare for the match. They too had spent a sleepless night brainstorming strategies for the next game. "I realized I had a responsibility to them," Anand says. "I had to go into the next game with confidence."
It worked. Anand beat Gelfand in just 17 moves, the fastest win in championship history. The Lightning Kid was back. From that point on, Anand never doubted he'd win. Four drawn games followed, and the rapid-fire tiebreaker series played to his advantage. Anand won the second game and tied the three others to keep his crown.
In India, the victory led to another outburst of chest-thumping headlines. Anand remains a rare exception to the country's poor sporting record. Only one Indian has ever won an individual Olympic gold, in air-rifle shooting, and the country added none at the London Games. Anand's success, on the other hand, has led to a chess explosion: India now has 26 grandmasters, not many compared with Russia (214) and Ukraine (79) but still impressive, considering there were none before Anand. In his home state of Tamil Nadu, chess has been added to the school curriculum. On my flight to Chennai to meet Anand, the passenger in the next seat tells me he hopes both his infant sons will become chess players, because "Anand has shown that it's a way to success."
There may be more success yet. The win against Gelfand, Anand says, "comes as a shot in the arm." He admits that his game was lacking in the two years leading to the championship match but believes he can return to his best. "Everyone's allowed a low period, but I feel I still have a lot to give," he says. Rather than retire as champ, he envisions eventually being defeated by a young challenger and then easing up on his tournament schedule until he feels he is no longer able to compete. "But that's the long way off," he adds, anticipating my question. "A really long way."
The message to Carlsen, Aronian and the rest of the young cohort is clear: the champion's still very much indahouse.
- Bobby Ghosh / Chennai
- India's brilliant chess champ