When you think of Indian chess and any firsts associated with it, the architect behind it is invariably Viswanathan Anand. India’s first grandmaster, India’s only world champion till date, and until last year, India’s highest-ranked chess player, Anand has paved a way which the likes of D Gukesh are aspiring to follow, starting with the FIDE World Championship match in Singapore later this month.
Anand’s five world titles are the story of a pathbreaker, not just in Indian chess but in world chess. It is the story of a non-Soviet, non-Westerner who dared to take on the established seat of authority in the sport, and succeeded in toppling it.
Here’s how he won each of those five titles, with stories and anecdotes taken from his book, Mind Master: Winning Lessons from a Champion’s Life.
2000: India’s first-ever world champion
Anand’s first world title came in a period when there were two different world championships, following the split between FIDE and both the champion and challenger in 1993, when Nigel Short and Garry Kasparov both split from FIDE to set up the Professional Chess Association. So between 1993 and 2006, there was the PCA’s Classical World Championship and FIDE’s World Championship as well.
In 2000, among a field of 100 players, Anand was seeded first, and hence had gotten a bye in the first round. It was smooth sailing for him until the quarterfinals against Alexander Khalifman. The matches were all two-game affairs followed by tie-breaks at faster time controls. Anand writes that he had “slithered out of tricky positions” in the first two tie-break games. Eventually, he won the fifth game in the tie-break after four successive draws.
Veselin Topalov, one of the other contenders for that title, had remarked from the audience that “Vishy should be called the snake [not the tiger] of Madras!”, due to his ability to wriggle his way out of tough situations, as he had during that quarterfinal against Khalifman.
After all the rounds were held in New Delhi, the final was held in Tehran, where Anand faced Alexei Shirov amid a bout of upset stomachs for both him and his team. Anand went into the final against Shirov with the knowledge that it wouldn’t be easy, particularly as the Spaniard had beaten him at both the Linares and the Ambert tournaments earlier that year.
However, in the final, Shirov’s performances didn’t match those that had set him out in Anand’s mind as a difficult opponent. Anand writes that his Delhi belly ended up being the fullest extent of troubles he had to face during the final, as he picked up three straight wins after a draw in the first match to take the title.
2007: Unified World Champion
Unlike the 100-strong field in 2000, the 2007 World Championship was to be a double round-robin featuring just eight players, akin to the Candidates tournaments of today. Anand was in a field that included Vladimir Kramnik, Peter Svidler, Alexander Morozevich, Peter Leko, Boris Gelfand, Levon Aronian and Alexander Grischuk.
Anand had four wins in 14 matches – one each against Aronian, Svidler, Grischuk and Morozevich, in rounds 2, 5, 7, and 11 respectively. He ended up not losing a single match, drawing each of the other 10, giving him a total of 9 points, and making him a clear winner, over Kramnik who finished second with eight points.
It was another example of how not losing is as important, if not more, than winning matches during the World Championships. Kramnik’s only loss at the tournament came in round 9 to Morozevich. This was a sweet win for Anand, as for the first time, he could be called the undisputed world champion, as his win in 2000 came when both FIDE and the PCA had their own world championships running in the same year. “This time there is no rival claimant, so obviously it is a fantastic feeling. You can imagine how I feel. This is something very special for me. I feel that here I played the best. You have to perform at the right moment-it’s important that I peaked here. This tournament went like a dream,” Anand said at the post-event press conference.
2008: Anand gets the better of Kramnik
In 2008, the world champion Anand had to play against Kramnik, who was given the right to regain the title that he had won in 2006, following the complications in reunifying the world title in 2006. Anand won with 6.5 points in 11 games (in what was designed to be a 12-game affair), winning three of the first six games (two with black).
In his book, Anand credits this win to one big change he had made after his win in 2007, that he would switch from the 1.e4 opening (queen’s pawn). He had revolved all his preperation around Kramnik’s own signature 1.d4 opening (king’s pawn). Anand writes that Kramnik would have anticipated that he would play 1.e4 and would’ve been prepared to lay his traps, so Anand’s scheme was designed to throw him off. The Indian had worked on those plans for close to half a year with his team.
Kramnik had tried to throw Anand off, by taking on Leko, who had previously worked as Anand’s second, as his own second, but since Leko hadn’t worked with Anand for nine years before that, the Indian felt that it wasn’t an ethical transgression.
Anand won three times in the opening six games, and didn’t lose until game 10. That meant he had only needed a draw to retain his world championship. So, he switched back to his comfort zone in game 11 and played the queen’s pawn opening. He writes that Kramnik didn’t seem to anticipate it and played a variation which threw a bunch of drawing options for white, and Anand eventually gladly took that.
Anand had played the final two games of the match in a feverish state and with aching muscles. He would later go on to realise that those were the symptoms of the start of a bout of chickenpox, passed on to both him and his wife Aruna by Surya Sekhar Ganguly, one of his seconds. Fortunately, by the time the blisters had taken full effect on Anand’s body, the match was over and he was a three-time world champion.
2010: The three-peat
This was perhaps the most eventful of all of Anand’s world championships. Veselin Topalov was his challenger, and the match was scheduled on his home turf – the Bulgarian capital Sofia. Anand had requested for a postponement of the world championships by a few days, as he was unable to board his flight from Frankfurt to Sofia, due to volcanic ash spewing from Eyjafjallajökul in Iceland.
Following a 40-hour road trip through multiple countries to reach Sofia, Anand played the first game which was delayed by a day. That was not before his team had gotten word, and kept from him, that Topalov had access to a super computer with what Anand terms as ‘frighteningly superior hardware’. That Anand lost the first game didn’t do much to allay their fears, but he puts the loss down to mixing up the order of moves in the Grunfeld Defence. Anand also didn’t get the order of moves right in the second game, playing with white, but was gifted what he terms a wholly undeserved point to tie the scores in the match.
Anand won in game 4 as well, and was sailing relatively smoothly until his loss in game 8 tied the scores once again, and it remained tied until game 12, the last game before the tie-breaks in faster tie controls. There, Topalov rushed to create momentum and play in order to win the game, and avoid the rapid tie-break against Anand, which the Bulgarian later admitted as being his mistake. Anand was only too happy to take that gamble from Topalov, and he had sealed a hat-trick of world titles.
“I had survived the after-effects of a volcanic ash cloud, embarked on a 40 hour road trip across Europe, battled threats of a supercomputer, lived with a spy [who had been embedded with Anand’s team due to fears of Bulgarian authorities bugging Anand’s surroundings] – and brought home a World Championship title. Now I’d seen everything,” Anand wrote in Mind Master.
2012: Far from his best, but the best in the world
By now, when Anand took on Boris Gelfand for his shot at a fourth straight world title, he had felt that his chess abilities were on the wane, and he was just not able to create play as he was once able to.
Gelfand made the first strike in the match, winning game 7, and leaving Anand needing to win a game to at least take the match to tie-breaks. Anand hadn’t won a tournament in the two years since beating Topalov. Anand had run into what he called a creative crisis. Starting from the second half of 2011 until the match against Gelfand, he won just four classical games. He wrote in his book that such a terrible statistic stuck in his head.
However, in game 8, Anand won in only 17 moves, which was the shortest ever game with a result in world championship history. Anand played through draws in the four remaining classical games, and then went on to win the second of four games in the rapid tie-breaks to become a five-time world champion.
He spent his entire career going where no man from his country had ever been, and in winning five world championship titles, he’s given a path for a burgeoning young generation of Indian chess stars to follow.
