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The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay campus, in Powai, played host to the national championship and though the Madras district chess association had taken the ambitious decision to field a team of promising teens from the state, the Madras Colts, they had no money to fund our participation. Consequently, renowned Indian playback singer S.P. Balasubrahmanyam stepped in and agreed to sponsor the team.
To caution myself against blitzing when I’m tense during a game, my note reads: ‘When you’re almost winning and have more time than your opponent, DO NOT make a move. Pull your hand back. Get up, drink tea, wash your face, take a deep breath and then come back to the board.’
At times, after games, I’ve been tired and put off the self-chastising exercise for later. But by the next morning the intensity is gone. What ends up as notes then is a paraphrase of a paraphrase. It’s a hit-and-miss scenario, because the immediacy is lost. All that the brief notes that I scribble with half a heart after a late breakfast the morning after a game tell me now is that I survived.
It’s difficult if chess is all you know. For the brilliant and gifted Fischer, this had proved to be true. He was unable to detach himself from the sport.
Sometimes, a goal can be such a big deal, such an all-consuming theme in our lives, that we just don’t know what to look forward to any more after we’ve achieved it.
But when the positions were randomized, making no logical sense whatsoever, each group, including the Grandmasters, placed only three or four pieces correctly. It showed that Grandmasters didn’t look at or commit to memory the positions of individual pieces; rather, they remembered pieces in groups, structures or patterns.
Similarly, in my younger years, I could rattle off all the phone numbers I’d ever dialled, but now I don’t look up a number any more, only the contact list on my phone. So that part of my memory lies unused and has become rusty.
Ahead of the World Championship matches in Mexico, Bonn and Sofia, in 2007, 2008 and 2010 respectively, Magnus Carlsen, then a teen, came over to spar with me.
The rule of thumb for remembering deeply is to look at a position once, then not look at it for a day, then go over it once again and skip it for three days, and then go back and look at it yet again. By the eighth time you’ve looked at it, your brain has already encoded the memory and every time you come back to it, it only gets reinforced.
1995 Intel Rapid Chess Grand Prix tournament in Paris, in what was supposed to be my first game against Kasparov after our World Championship match that year, I jumbled up the start time. It didn’t work in my favour that I had confused trois (3 p.m.) and treize (thirteen, 1300 hours). I should have simply clarified the time in English. I walked into the hall only in time to play the second game, and that too because I’d decided to get there early to settle in!
I’ve also been guilty of misplacing at least half a dozen gemstone rings that I wore on my mother’s insistence and her faith in their good providence. Of course, it was only the jeweller who had a good run of luck as the precious stones kept growing in size and value each time I lost one. Tired of my repeated carelessness, she eventually gave up buying them.
It’s a lot like making a financial investment. There’s little merit in deliberating over the options that could have been exercised earlier. What matters is the worth of your existing resources.
When you see tennis players furious at themselves, after they’ve lost a point perhaps or right after an unfavourable umpire call, beating their rackets against the court, you realize they are venting their frustration, but their mood isn’t really improving. In fact, that kind of violent channelling only makes it worse.
The World Championship match between Kasparov and Karpov in Seville in 1987 offered me a profound lesson in objectivity. Here was the world’s greatest player, Kasparov, trailing 11–12 in the match, but instead of striking his head against the washboard over his predicament, he spent the entire night playing cards. He had realized that he wasn’t going to come up with answers overnight.
Very often, a few moves before your opponent makes a blunder, you can sense things begin to curdle. It’s inexplicable. It’s the kind of intuition that possibly comes from a heightened sense of awareness of the space around you. It’s hard to simulate that while training
Bottling up emotions, even if done bit by bit, one tiny instance after another, can cumulatively turn into a giant, unwieldy heap of rocks you can no longer tow. You just keep pushing down the angst, pretending nothing has happened, but the truth is it’s going nowhere. If you bury it for too long, the collection of repressed emotions will simmer and eventually boil over in a fiercer form, often at the most ill-timed moments when you can barely afford it.
I REMEMBER A CONVERSATION WITH KEN THOMPSON, ONE OF THE inventors of the UNIX operating system and B programming language, both path-breaking foundations of present-day computing.
On being asked if computers would ever catch up with humans in strategy, Thompson’s response was, ‘Of course! Strategy is just long-term tactics.’ It was an intriguing observation and over time I have come to realize its proximity to the truth.
But if your opponent is the kind of player who outperforms with surprises, then instead of obsessing over one aspect it’s practical to spread yourself thin with a minimum level of preparation in all areas.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that any player who doesn’t train himself to be flexible right from his days as a junior competitor will run into problems later.
The Dragon is a variation of the Sicilian which draws its name from the resemblance of the Black kingside pawn structure to the Draco constellation in the northern sky, also known as the Dragon.
Sometimes, odd tunes play in a loop in my head, like Akhil’s nursery rhyme ‘Pat a Cake’, which I couldn’t stop humming during one of the tie-break games at the 2012 World Championship tournament against Gelfand.
I can’t deny, though, that it’s easy to remember only the good times and think, ‘Oh, this is my luckiest shirt,’ and forget about the times I’ve lost while wearing it.
A question cropped up on the World Championship match we’d played against each other – that Karpov had won – in Lausanne just a week earlier. As a corollary to it, there came a query on my future prospects of being a World Champion. ‘Ah, well, Vishy’s a nice guy,’ Karpov remarked with a happy snort, ‘but he just doesn’t have the character for a big win.’
I had a feeling Kasparov took me fairly seriously for the match – possibly because he couldn’t read me fully and couldn’t tell for himself when I was playing safe. Also, one of his greatest fears then was losing his title to complacency.
For me, the match against Kasparov turned out to be a listicle of all the things I shouldn’t attempt in scenarios of similar magnitude.
Manhattan looked startlingly breathtaking from 1,310 feet in the sky and spectators paid five times the regular observation deck fee of $15 to be seated in the viewing area of the match.
I was thoroughly unprepared for. In game 11, Kasparov uncorked the Dragon variation of the Sicilian Defence, a feared counterattack to White’s 1.e4 push and a line he had never employed before in a major match.
In June 1996, I got married to Aruna. Our parents had picked us out for each other in what was a conventional arranged marriage match, or, as Frederic puts it, a ‘catalogue wedding’.
We barely knew each other, but since we found no reason to say ‘no’ we said ‘yes’.
My marriage was very nearly on the rocks in the initial months since every time Aruna wanted to call her parents in Madras from Madrid or wherever we were travelling to for tournaments, I’d inundate her with complex details of the most effective plan to use. It irritated her no end and she soon made sure I threw that habit out of the window.
we teased him by giving him the title of ‘Señor Corte Inglés’ (alluding to Spain’s largest department and fashion store chain) for his sharp suits and fine sweaters.
The prodigious Joshua Waitzkin, who took on chess hustlers as a seven-year-old in New York’s Washington Square Park and won his first national championship at the age of nine, was thrown into the vortex of public expectation as a teen after a book on him written by his father was turned into a major motion picture.
The understanding between us was that if Carlsen qualified for the World Championship against me that year, Nielsen would stay neutral and step away from any preparatory work for or against me.
My problem is slightly different: My intuition tends to behave like a child who gives an answer and immediately wants to know if it is correct. When I feel I know the answer to the problem staring me in the face, I make my move, not exactly because I’m dying of curiosity to know the outcome but just to be certain that it’s right.
received a computer as a gift in 1987 and had to leave it in Amsterdam with Albert Toby while the application seeking permission for it to be brought to India was being processed in New Delhi. It took roughly eight months for the sanction to come through and I finally flew back to India with it the next year.
The good part was that suddenly all the information I wanted was packed into this one machine and I no longer needed to ferry around bulky books to tournaments. Since I could also use the computer to play games, the benefits seemed manifold. It was, however, a nightmare getting it cleared through Customs at the Madras airport.
Eventually, I was allowed to bring the computer home, after some timely intervention by Manuel Aaron, who spoke to the Customs officials and also wrote critically about the incident in a national daily.
We had two telephone lines at home for some reason and my father said I could reserve one exclusively for the fax machine. We had no idea it was illegal to do this. Apparently, you had to apply for a separate fax line if you wanted to operate a fax machine.
On 11 May 1997, the IBM Supercomputer Deep Blue beat Kasparov in a six-game match under standard time controls. Kasparov had at the time raised doubts over it being a chess automation hoax and alleged that it may, after all, have been controlled by a human Grandmaster.
In June 1999, I played Karpov in León, Spain, in an advanced game in which each player is teamed with a computer. It was intended to show how a human player and a computer working together could produce higher-quality games. I doubt we succeeded in doing that. As someone put it, ‘It was Anand with a computer against Karpov with a high-tech scoresheet,’ since the greater challenge for him seemed to be finding his way around using the computer.
with new developments. With access to more data, players today have the opportunity to see more patterns and, if the eyes are trained to see them, it improves pattern recognition and the understanding of new positions. However, if the data is not understood, then its effect can be negative.
If you simply look at a whole lot of variations without seeing a broader pattern or don’t develop a fundamental understanding of what is happening in the larger landscape, then the data could be a burden rather than an aid.
We conducted a quick search on Google for a solution, and, as per the recommendations, held the laptop fan-end before the vent of the air conditioner, Aruna having voluntarily climbed a chair and a table to do this. This turned into a routine. Every day, after they played games for long hours, the computers were allowed a cool-off time in front of the AC vent.
When it comes to data, though, the need for discretion takes centre stage. ‘The more, the better’ certainly isn’t a clever principle to swear by. There is little use in having a lot of information if it leads you to confusion about the choice you should be making.
Much of what people say about AI changing the world sounds incredibly similar to the rhetoric on old-style computer programs when they burst upon the scene.
At the cost of oversimplification, what AI does is to remove the loss of information that would occur when we tried to capture and explain in words the essence of intuitive play.
Increasingly, the efforts required are less. I can switch on an engine, leave it for a while, watch a movie and then come back and see what the engine has done, because it will have the right conclusions.
The story goes that Caruana and Carlsen began using AI at least six months before everyone else, since they were preparing for their match in November 2018.
When tension is stabbing at you with a bowie knife, the mind and stomach refuse to process the idea of a meal. Food then should turn both inconspicuous and effortless, a sandwich or wrap, or a banana and milkshake.
