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October 16 - November 5, 2025
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.
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.
Apple founder Steve Jobs’s life story is compelling. His calligraphy lessons under an ex-Trappist monk at Reed College in Portland, learning about serif and sans serif typefaces
The path to a happy, unplanned discovery starts with learning. It doesn’t matter if what you’re learning now isn’t of immediate relevance to the pool of resources you draw upon. In the end, these bits – the book you wanted to browse through but ended up buying, the language course you took to kill time on weekends or the guitar lessons you signed up for in college – might just come together one day, unexpectedly, beautifully, almost by accident.
You don’t feel the need to identify your problem areas and work on them, because you’re still raking in wins.
I’ve found that I’ve played my most inspired games when my enthusiasm for the sport resurfaced, without the bindings of titles or wins or ratings tying me down, and I’ve just wanted to play a good game and have been excited about learning something new
The mind only recovers emotionally when it can replace an old memory with a new, more pleasant one.
Unlike many others, Carlsen can be quite difficult to read, because he can look both uninterested and confident at the same time.
Training your mind to take a step back at the crucial moment and developing cues to organize your thoughts is more advantageous than making a move while your mind is in turmoil.
At the board, Tal’s moves were not about difficulty of calculation; rather, they revolved around intimidating the opponent’s mind. His approach involved posing a plethora of tactical problems. The truth is, very few players like to defend against too many pieces or be weighed down by calculations while
This is not just true of chess – even in your everyday roles, say in your career or with your skill set, being narrow can be self-defeating. If your particular expertise or function is suddenly fulfilled by artificial intelligence or automation, or outsourced
Carlsen, on the contrary, uses dry, bloodless positions brilliantly to his advantage, playing dead drawn endings, navigating into complexity and hatching fresh threats until his opponent cracks. He employed this strategy against me at the 2013 World Championship, and I ended up losing my title.
every situation where the outcome is important rouses the irrational in human beings. The actual cause and effect is less significant than the apprehension that brings such thoughts to mind.
It was my match against Kasparov in New York in 1995 that changed my attitude.
The match against Kasparov in New York in 1995 changed my attitude from being content playing good games and winning occasionally to being completely driven to becoming the World Champion.
The way I see it, talent is a lot like a plant. When it’s watered with hard work, it grows, branches out and blooms.
Fischer learnt to play chess after his younger sister brought a chess set home from a candy store. By age 14, he won the US Championship, and a year later became the youngest Grandmaster in the world.
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.
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.
It took AI’s program AlphaZero just four hours from being fed with nothing but the rules of the game for it to destroy the highest-rated chess engine Stockfish in a 1,000-game match. It’s a testament to AI’s extraordinary ability to master gameplay.
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.
We joked that if he qualified for the next World Championship final against me, he should still come over and train me.
Magnus
when Putin learnt that I had got my early chess lessons at the Tal Chess Club in Madras, he chuckled. ‘Oh, so you’re a problem we brought upon ourselves!’ he said.
Tiger Woods breaking his 11-year drought at the Majors with his win at the Augusta Masters
