Monarch of Moves
Viswanathan Anand played the toughest match of his life. His opponent blundered with two seconds left on the clock. That was enough for Anand to win.
Nikolai Gogol would have, okay, giggled. That Viswanathan Anand won his fifth World Championship title in Moscow is sweet. His grim, dour victory over Boris Gelfand, older than Anand by a year, came at the end of a nerve- jangling tiebreak. The tie- break has been around the world championship since 1985 but was first required only in 1998, when Russia’s Anatoly Karpov defeated this Indian fellow whose 1990s nickname used to be the Lightning Kid.
This time in Moscow it was the Lightning Kid’s turn. When Anand set out in professional chess, he was up against the Soviet chess machine, which had ground down all opposition for more than four decades. Every talent in the Eastern Bloc, sometimes spotted at the age of six, was nurtured, trained and then went out onto the circuit backed by Mother Russia’s heritage and an army of formidable coaches, with two or three ‘ seconds’ ( chess terminology for assistants/ trainers/ partners) behind every player just manually looking through information of the next rival.
Anand set out into the pro chess world as a teenager accompanied by nothing other than his game, with a drive that is hard to spot in this polite, personable fellow. Until he sits at a table with a chess board in front of him.
Then his opponents discover that behind those glasses, neat, patted- down hair, ironed shirts and polite trousers is a beastly, competitor. ( Anand once revealed that the moods and minds of opponents could be sensed by just listening to their breathing).
Anand— and with him the noble, battling Gelfand— belong to a bridge generation, the last of the generation who took to chess before the advent of computers. He could be the most versatile and adaptable world chess champion, having won world titles across all formats— classical, knockout and tournament. He is also the first Asian to win the title.
He went into the 2012 World Championship final without world- beater ‘ form’, dropping 26 points on his ELO rating in the last six months. He is not world No. 1 any more, he has just been introduced to the sleep- deprived world of new fatherhood and in the middle of this, runs up against an opponent who is suddenly producing moves he had never produced in his life. Anand found himself in the “toughest match” of his life.
Yet, one of the most revealing moments came in the eighth game. Anand, having just been beaten by Gelfand in the seventh, wiped out his opponent in seventeen moves. It was the shortest decisive game in a world chess championship final.
Chess coach Raghunandan Gokhale says Anand is “a complete chess player… if Kramnik likes the cool and calm game, Anand will play sharp. If Topalov likes the sharp game, Anand will play calm. In many ways Gelfand is also a complete player but if you make a mistake, Anand will smash you. In this final, Anand’s had the better nerves”.
Or call it drive. In the classical games, Anand drew from uncomfortable positions that Gelfand put him in, which, in the reckoning of internationally rated chess player and columnist Devangshu Datta, was the first time in about 10 years he found himself so hedged in. When it came to the rapid, time- controlled tie- breaker, Datta says, “Anand is just a very fast thinker.”
The tie- break games may have been close, “but Gelfand had been put into a situation where he was left with two seconds on the clock and he blundered. The world title and $ 2.55m was decided in a two- second span of time”.
When Anand returns to Chennai to be with his son, Anand Akhil, the Candidates will begin to find the man to challenge the world champion in 2013. Anand knows that no world chess champion who won his title on a tie- break— Karpov in 1998, Rustam Kasimdzhanov in 2004 or Vladimir Kramnik in 2006— has ever won it again. There will be a brood of younger men— and of course Gelfand, who will pick himself up— wanting the title and waiting to swoop. It will become, all over again, Anand’s toughest game. Yet has Anand ever played with the odds on his side? Think of pioneering teenager, the twentysomething against the Soviet machine, the thirtysomething playing every format he was asked to play, the fortysomething driving 40 hours, 2,000 km and five countries across Europe to avoid the volcanic ash cloud to get to his world championship final in Sofia. ( He asked for a three- day postponement to recover from his journey, was given just one).
So, in a contest between Anand and the odds— or age or time— when it comes to choosing a winner or predicting an outcome, think very carefully. Remember, in chess, it takes two seconds to make a very big mistake against him.