THE LONG GAME
By Jo Johnson
FT
January 19 2008 02:00
Viswanathan Anand, the supreme exponent of blitz chess, has made
his first move by the time I join him at our table. Watermelon
juice. Cold. The Indian press has been wall-to-wall "Vishy" since
he won the World Championship last September, but, given the raw
processing power required of his brain, the celebrations have been
mostly teetotal. "I’ll have a glass of wine once in a while," he
says. "Just not before a match. That would not be a good idea because
at my age I don’t have the tolerance of the young Russian boys:
three glasses and they’re still fine the next morning."
An ancient game, chess gets younger every year. For a player of his
age, Anand’s synapses are in remarkable form. His victory at the World
Chess Championship in Mexico pushed his Federation Internationale des
Echecs (FIDE) rating above the 2,800 barrier. It is a feat achieved by
only three other players in the history of the game – Garry Kasparov,
Vladimir Kramnik and Veselin Topalov. "Even if age is not an immense
advantage in chess, to put it mildly, sometimes a bit of experience
is not so bad," he says. "I am surprised at how good my 37th year
has been."
The chef at Cappuccino, a restaurant in the Park Sheraton hotel in
Chennai, Anand’s hometown, is already waiting to take our order,
beaming benevolently at the city’s favourite son. Anand follows his
recommendations: Tuscan fresh tomato soup as a starter, followed by
wholewheat spaghetti with creamy lobster and smoked salmon sauce.
I order the same, as I have so been busy explaining to Anand how my
mobile phone will also be acting as a voice recorder that I haven’t
managed to look at the menu.
The average age of the top 100 chess players in FIDE’s ranking is
just 30.
When Kasparov retired from tournament chess in 2005, at the age
of 41, he gleefully announced to Anand: "I’m out, now you’re the
oldest! You’re the dinosaur now!" Anand says he works hard to
maintain his stamina, exercising in the gym for 90 minutes each
day, to compensate for the physical edge that the 17-year-olds have
on him. His forearms, revealed by a turquoise short-sleeved shirt
blazoned with the logo of his sponsor, NIIT, an Indian IT training
company, are more builder than brainbox.
Even though he now lives most of the year in Spain, Anand has in
a sense brought chess home to India. But it is a different game
to the one born on the subcontinent. If there is a consensus over
the game’s murky origins it is that chess appeared in India around
600AD, moved to Persia 100 years later and then in the ninth century
reached Europe via Arab Spain, where the queen, replacing a docile
male vizier permitted only to move to a diagonal adjacent square,
eventually became the most powerful piece on the board. The old
version of the game is still played in Delhi and Lucknow.
The first "non-Soviet" champion since Bobby Fischer, Anand believes
India now has a chance to excel on the globalised chess battlefield,
suggesting that the country’s success in information technology may
spring from the same genetic code. "Indians generally do very badly in
sport, but they seem to take very naturally to chess," he says. "By
non-Russian standards, India is pretty good." Although India is only
ranked 14th in FIDE’s rating system, many of the countries that are
placed higher depend heavily on Russian emigres.
Anand is trying to reintroduce chess to India, where the passion
for cricket leaves scant resources for other sports. With NIIT,
he has pushed for the introduction of computer-based chess tuition
and competitions in Indian schools, launching the Mind Champions’
Academy, an initiative that has fostered nearly 6,000 clubs with more
than 100,000 student members. The idea is not to hothouse champions
or do heavy-duty coaching, but to help stretch young minds. "Studies
show that chess playing made people do better academically and brought
down juvenile crime," he says.
For a chess prodigy, Anand managed to have a relatively normal
childhood.
His father was general manager of Southern Railway, whose network
covers the states at the tip of the Indian peninsula. At the age
of six, after watching his elder brother and sister playing chess,
he developed an interest in the game. "I went to my mom and said
‘teach me’. She acted as my coach for the next six years." Many of
the great players started even younger, he says, some when they were
just three or four: "If you have a natural aptitude, it shows early."
His infatuation with the game deepened when his family moved to the
Philippines for a year, shortly after the town of Baguio had hosted
the notorious 1978 World Championship clash between Anatoly Karpov, the
defending Soviet champion, and Viktor Korchnoi, who had defected to the
west two years earlier. Newspapers revelled in the cold war mindgames
that saw Korchnoi forced to wear mirror glasses to ward off Karpov’s
hypnotic stares, passionate protests about the flags used on the board,
and histrionics that required the players’ chairs to be X-rayed.
"A normal childhood is important. There’s a point where being fanatical
about chess doesn’t help you become a better player. Going to school
would give me a chance to forget about chess for a while. Children
are very smart and they can easily learn to balance both academics
and chess." By the time he was 16, however, Anand had won the
national championship and was travelling half the year. He pursued a
bachelor’s degree in commerce at Chennai’s elite Loyola College only
as "a fallback". When he graduated, he was India’s first grandmaster
and was ranked ninth in the world.
He developed a reputation as a lightning-fast player but also as
one who was at ease in all the game’s formats: matches against one
opponent, round-robin tournaments and bouts against computers. He
won his first world championship in 2000 – when the title was split
between two rival federations – and again last year, by which time it
had been reunified. Glory may be short-lived. In October he must take
on Vladimir Kramnik, a former world champion who came in second in
Mexico and was granted the right to re-challenge Anand for his title,
to the normally placid Indian’s irritation.
Computers capable of calculating millions of permutations have
closed down areas of the game. Endgames with six or fewer pieces, for
example, now hold little interest to connoisseurs. Breakthroughs are
"difficult", Anand says.
"Five centuries ago people got to name whole countries. Two centuries
ago they could name a district. Now you just get to name a garden." But
the game is far from played out. "It’s alive right now. Revolutionary
stuff can turn up anywhere, often without you realising it. When a
game’s on the line, sometimes you come up with great stuff."
In Mexico, he had "a couple of great ideas", developments on the Moscow
variation of the Semi-Slav Defence, that tilted the game against Levon
Aronian, a strong Armenian player. Anand surprised Aronian with his
17th move of c5. This unexpected ploy locked Aronian’s bishop out of
the game.
Weeks of careful preparation had paid off. "He didn’t have certainty,"
says Anand, who went on to take the game and then the championship. "He
thought I might have made a mistake."
When he returned to India, a country that takes enormous pride in
the success of its diaspora, he was greeted as a hero. Mani Shankar
Aiyar, the country’s maverick sports minister, who has refused to
endorse India’s ambitions to host major international events on the
grounds that they are irrelevant to the common man, hailed Anand’s
victory as an "utterly remarkable achievement… without parallel
or precedent". Yet for all the honours that India has bestowed upon
him over the years, he is sceptical of the euphoria about its new
"superpower" status, describing it as "premature".
"What’s actually changed? Is it India or is it just western perceptions
of India?" he asks. Yet he acknowledges that India’s increasing
integration with the global economy may help him spend more time
here. He and his wife, Aruna, who manages his relations with the
media and the logistics of his life as a roving grandmaster, have just
bought a home in Chennai. He says he will start "gravitating" back to
India. "I moved to Spain because I wanted to work with strong players,"
he says. "Now it’s much easier to work remotely over the internet."
Much of his best preparatory work, however, still takes place in
face-to-face sessions with his longstanding principal second, Peter
Heine Nielsen. The 34-year-old Danish grandmaster, whose FIDE rating
of 2,626 puts him just outside the top 100, plays a role similar to a
golfer’s caddy, Anand says, "keeping track of all the information he
needs to avoid a mistake". They work mainly on computers, with Anand
only using a board just before a game "to get a feel for the pieces"
in intense sessions that last eight or nine hours.
As the flag falls on our lunch, the moment I have been half-dreading
arrives. It would be a dereliction of duty not to offer him a
game. "Full size!" he says in delight, as I produce a folding wooden
set from my bag.
Determined to avoid a humiliating "cheapo", as quick defeats are known,
I play cautiously as the waiters line up to watch. Anand makes his
moves within milliseconds of mine. Within 20 moves, my position is
hopeless and I resign. "Many good moves," he says encouragingly,
as he scribbles down the notation from memory. "Not bad at all for
someone who doesn’t play often."
As the restaurant manager snaps away with his camera, Anand resets the
board, his pieces lining up instantly as mine stumble towards their
appointed positions. After my first game since before the millennium,
I am too relieved I have remembered basic moves to want to risk a
second. For me to level the score against a player of his ranking
would be an event so unlikely that even if I played him twice daily
until the end of time I would be lucky to witness it. We call it a day.
Jo Johnson is the FT’s south Asia bureau chief.
Cappuccino, ITC Park Sheraton & Towers, Chennai
1 x bottled water
2 x Tuscan fresh tomato soup
2 x penne with creamy lobster and smoked salmon
2 x jasmine tea
Total: Rs2,721.48