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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.