He’s the only player to have won and held the title in three different formats, and each time, he has re-invented himself to suit the game. Clearly, a man for the occasion.
You need headology to win head-to-head,” said Muhammad Ali. The Greatest obviously knew what he was talking about. When nine-year-old Viswanathan Anand arrived in The Philippines in 1979, the 1975 ‘Thriller in Manila’ was still being regularly aired on TV.
In that battle of the heavyweights, Ali was under early pressure as Joe Frazier attacked. In Round 12, Frazier exposed his face for a split second. Ali was waiting. He blasted out four laser-accurate punches that sliced up Frazier’s eyebrows and blinded him.
Now the world chess champion is not a boxing fan. But he imbibed Ali’s nugget of sporting wisdom. Headology, mental toughness, nerves, call it what you will, Anand displayed it in full this week, defending his title from Veselin Topalov’s determined challenge.
| World Championship Sofia 2010 Game 12 White's king is exposed. 34...Qe8! With the threat of Qh5#. After 35.g4 h5! 36.Kh4 g5+!? 37.fxg6 Qxg6 38.Qf1 Rxg4+ 39.Kh3 Re7! 40.Rf8+ Kg7! - Anand says he suffered a near heart attack when he saw the alternate 40.--Kh7 41. Rh8+ Kxh8 42. Qf8+ Qg8 43. Qxe7 until he found the winning 43. --Qc8!. 41.Nf5+ White avoids the lovely 41.Rxa8 Rxe3+! 42.Rxe3 Rh4+!! 43.Kxh4 Qg4# motif. |
Play continued 41...Kh7! 42.Rg3 Rxg3+ 43.hxg3 Qg4+ 44.Kh2 Re2+ 45.Kg1 Rg2+ 46.Qxg2 Bxg2 47.Kxg2. The "equalising" 47.Rf7+ Kg6! 48.Rg7+ Kxf5 49.Rxg4 hxg4! 50.Kxg2 Ke4 51.Kf2 Kd3 is actually dead lost. Now Anand played it out precisely 47...Qe2+ 48.Kh3 c4! 49.a4 a5 50.Rf6 Kg8 51.Nh6+ Kg7 52.Rb6 Qe4. 53.Kh4 Qe4+! 54.Kxh5 Qd5+. 53.Kh2 Kh7 54.Rd6 Qe5 55.Nf7 Qxb2+ 56.Kh3 Qg7! (0-1).
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He started dreadfully, mixing up his moves in Game 1 to lose. He misplayed the opening in Game 2 before he found a way to win despite the gaffe. He struggled to draw several inferior positions and blundered into another loss after a long defence in Game 8. In between, he pulled off a sublime demolition act in Game 4.
Going into Game 12, the match was tied 2-2 in terms of wins. That final game could swing the title. If it ended indecisively, there would be rapid tiebreakers. The Indian GM suspected it all depended on handling tension. “It was very strange to think this could be one of the happiest days of my life, or one of the saddest, or something in-between. But there was not much to do but play. I knew it could come down to nerves in the end and I’m glad I did not crack first.”
Topalov held white going into Game 12 and the first mover advantage had been tangible. White had emerged the victor of every decisive game. ‘Vesko’s’ attacking style and energy had given him the initiative in the latter stages.
Anand points out, “For the last four years, we’d been beating each other with white so I had to solve certain problems. Games 7-11 was a difficult patch. I had winning chances in Game 9 but I didn’t finish it off. Game 10 was skating on thin ice with Veselin close to winning. It would have been very difficult to bounce back if I had lost.”
The system Anand played, the Queens Gambit Declined, Lasker Variation, included an obscure idea unearthed by his second, Polish GM Radoslaw Wojtaszek. It received a nod from Garry Kasparov, who commented that Anand should have tried it earlier. It created dynamic equality and a strange conundrum for Topalov.
The Bulgarian GM had grown increasingly disturbed at the possibility of tie-breaks. In rapid chess, Anand has a 13-3 head-to-head lead and Topalov understandably, didn’t rate his own chances. Less rationally, Topalov played tiebreaks for the title against Vladimir Kramnik on June 13, 2006 in Elista, and lost. He really, really didn’t want to play a rapid tiebreaker against Anand on May 13 and decided to avoid normal logical lines that would draw.
In a post-game interview Vesko said, “I was angry and nervous [Bulgarian like Russian, uses the same word for both emotions] about tiebreaks on the 13th. So I took a crazy risk.” Was he driven by superstition, or wrong logic? In hindsight, it is easy to say he wasn’t thinking straight.
A tiebreaker may have heavily favoured Anand. But once Anand found the answer to the risk-taking, the possibility became moot. “When he opened up his king, I was very surprised. I knew one of us had missed something. I’d already seen Qe8 (the winning move), which he missed. I don’t know if I could have taken the risks he did. I suffered a near heart-attack later when I noticed a couple of saving possibilities but I was always winning if I played accurately.”
Anand played very accurately indeed, executing a powerful attack and then finishing off a winning endgame. It was an emphatic way to defend the title he won in 2007. Topalov displayed great sportsmanship by smiling as he offered resignation and shaking hands twice as they dropped into animated discussion onstage.
It was the first time the two had spoken directly since they shook hands and sat down to Game1. Anand says, “Veselin needs to hate opponents in order to play his best. He is a very strong, very gritty opponent but he can’t detach from his emotions. We don’t have a bad relationship so he reverted to normal once it was over. Match situations are strange. You try to get inside each other’s heads for months on end. Then, you see the same face across the board, day after day. It all adds to the tension. All the errors in this match are explained by that tension. It feels like it took a decade off my lifespan!”
Despite meticulous preparation, Anand and his team didn’t dope out Topalov’s strategy. “He surprised us by sticking to his guns and hammering away at the same systems. My preparation was stretched thin because we made some bad judgement calls about what he would play.” Anand adapted, shifting to “hitting and running, trying to get in the first surprise”, as he described it. This change of gear was one reason he played much slower than his wont. He was improvising and to an extent, playing unnaturally. Topalov is a hyper-aggressive player who likes to attack in complicated positions. Anand sought calmer, less tense situations, presenting subtler problems.
That is not how Anand generally plays. He’s renowned for his own aggression and against Vladimir Kramnik, in Bonn 2008, he attacked with high-voltage tactics, which are his natural metier. When he consciously cooled things off, Topalov must have felt like he was playing a different opponent.
The extreme flexibility is a logical extension of ‘playing the man’ but it is also tough to implement in practice. A sporting analogy would be to imagine Federer imitating Nadal. Even the greatest players have found it impossible to shift away from their trademark styles, a quality Anand displays, apparently at will.
The universality is a key element of the headology that buttresses a unique achievement. He’s the only player to have won and held the title in three different formats. He won it first in a knockout Wimbledon format in 2000, he won again in a Round-Robin tournament in 2007 and he’s defeated his two most credible challengers in successive matches. Each time, he re-invented himself to suit the format and cause the maximum difficulty to every given opponent.
In 2012, Anand must defend against his next challenger, whoever that may be. He’s likely to stick to the same team (Peter Heine Nielsen, Suryasekhar Ganguly, Rustam Kasmdzhanov and Wojtaszek) that’s served him so well through the past three years. But chameleon-like, the Chennai Super King will undoubtedly change his style again.
Along with his mental toughness, the headology could be enough to stave off the advancing years, one more time. As one of only 16 men to have ever held the 124-year-old title, Anand already belongs in the hall of fame. Another successful defence would put him right up there at the top of the chess pantheon. But right now “it’s like the sword hanging over my head has been removed. I don’t have to refer to myself yet as ‘former’ champion and I’m going to take at least a month off.”
The celebrations will have to be improvised however. Supreme rationalist that he may be on the chessboard, Anand does have a tiny superstitious streak. “I didn’t even dare to think about planning a celebration. If I had, after all, it might never have happened.”
Devangshu Datta is an internationally rated chess and correspondence chess player
| CAREER HIGHLIGHTS Born Dec 11, 1969 in Chennai (then Madras), India. Taught how to play chess by mother Suseela at around age six. 1984: Asian Junior Champion 1987: World Junior Champion 1987: India’s first Grandmaster 1991: First Super-tournament victory at Reggio Emilia (Italy) ahead of Kasparov and Karpov |
1993: World Championship quarter-finalist — lost to Karpov
1995: Title Challenger — lost title match to Kasparov
2000: Fide World Champion in KO format
2007: World Champion in Mexico, title tournament
2008: Retained title in Match against Vladimir Kramnik at Bonn (Germany)
2010 Retained title in match against Veselin Topalov at Sofia (Bulgaria)
Chess Oscar, “Player of the year” in 1997, 1998, 2003, 2004, 2007, 2008.
Unique distinction of winning the world title in three formats (KO, Round-Robin, Matches)
Has also won the World Blitz Championship and World Rapid Championship