Three Cheers To the Old Champion

With the successful defense of his second world title against the formidable Bulgarian GM Veselin Topalov earlier this month, Indian GM Vishwanathan Anand has again proved himself to be one of the greatest chess players of his era. The match went down to the wire, with both GMs tied at 5.5 with one game to play. In the final game, Anand, disadvantaged with Black pieces, still prevailed over his illustrious opponent.

[caption id="attachment_351" align="alignright" width="297" caption="Anand contemplates the position on the board."][/caption]

Anand was a childhood hero of mine. After he became the FIDE world junior champion in 1987, I think it was the Indian sports magazine, Sports Stars, that shipped with a centerfold of a youthful, bespectacled Anand staring intensely at a chess board. That image adorned the wall of my bedroom and fueled my own youthful, quixotic dreams of becoming a GM.

In a sense, Anand carried the hopes of all the youth from the developing world but specifically from South Asia. The fact that India is today poised not only as a rising economic but also a chess powerhouse owes a lot to Anand's spectacular exploits at the highest levels of chess. He has inspired an entire generation of chess players in India and South Asia. The only other Indian chess player to make his mark at international level before was Mir Sultan Khan (1905 - 1966), who won the prestigious British Championship three times between 1929 and 1933 before his promising career was cut short to attend to his duties in the service of an Indian prince.

When Anand first won the FIDE world chess championship in 2000, he became only the second person to wear the crown who was not of Russian or former Soviet background since 1937. The other person was the mercurial American GM Bobby Fischer, who, in a highly charged Cold War superpower theatrics of 1972, defeated the then world champion Boris Spassky of the USSR in Reykjavik, Iceland.

What was astonishing about Anand's meteoric rise was the suddenness with which he appeared out of seemingly nowhere to take the chess world by storm. Although the birthplace of chess, India did not have the state-backed chess patronage system of the USSR, which marketed the post-WW II global dominance of its chess players as the validation of its ideology, or a vibrant community of grandmasters, theorists, writers, supporters and clubs to match those in the US and Britain. When he attained the rank of grandmaster in 1988 at the age of 18, it was the first for his country.

One of the crowd-pleasing features of Anand's style is the speed with which he makes his moves. This has served him well in shorter formats of the game as well as in the classical format, where he almost never runs into time troubles. Imagine Sachin Tendulkar and Cameron White, unrivaled masters of Test and Twenty20 cricket, respectively, rolled into one. This capacity for lightning fast thinking earned Anand the nickname of 'speed demon' early in his career.

A new brat pack of chess superstars led by the 19-year-old Norwegian GM Magnus Carlsen, who became a GM at the age of 13, is snapping at the heels of Anand and his generation of grandmasters. In the next world championship cycle in 2012, Anand will face players who grew up on a diet of computer chess. It will be interesting to see if this new breed of players will be able to topple the last of the pre-Internet generation of grandmasters who still rule chess.