19
Feb
Viswanathan Anand – India
Viswanathan Anand (born December 11, 1969 in Chennai (then called Madras), India) is an Indian chess grandmaster and former FIDE world champion. In the January 2007 FIDE Elo rating list, Anand has a rating of 2779, making him the number two in the world (after Veselin Topalov). Anand is one of only four players in history to break the 2800 mark on the FIDE rating list and he has been among the top three ranked players in classical time control chess in the world continuously since 1997.
Chess career
Anand’s rise in the Indian chess world was meteoric. National level success came early for him when he won the National Sub-Junior Chess Championship with a score of 9/9 in 1983 at the age of fourteen. He became the youngest Indian to win the International Master Title at the age of fifteen, in 1984. At the age of sixteen he became the National Champion and won that title two more times. He played games at blitz speed, earning him the nickname “Lightning Kid” (“Blitz chess” is known in India as “Lightning chess”). In 1987, he became the first Indian to win the World Junior Chess Championship. In 1988, at the age of eighteen, he became India’s first Grandmaster.
“Vishy”, as he is sometimes called by his friends, burst upon the upper echelons of the chess scene in the early 1990s, winning such tournaments as Reggio Emilia 1991 (ahead of Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov). Playing at such a high level did not slow him down either, and he continued to play games at blitz speed. In 1991, he made the quarter finals of the FIDE Candidates Tournament, before losing narrowly to Anatoly Karpov.[1]
Anand qualified for the Professional Chess Association World Chess Championship final by winning the candidates matches against Michael Adams and Gata Kamsky.[2] In 1995, he played a title match against Kasparov in New York City’s World Trade Center. After an opening run of eight draws (a record for the opening of a world championship match), Anand won game nine using a splendid sacrifice on the queen side, but then lost four of the next five. He lost the match 10.5 – 7.5.
Anand won three consecutive Advanced Chess tournaments in Leon, Spain after Garry Kasparov introduced this form of chess in 1998, and is widely recognized as the world’s best Advanced Chess player, where humans may consult a computer to aid in their calculation of variations.
Anand’s recent tournament successes include the prestigious Corus chess tournament in years 2003, 2004, 2006 (tied with Veselin Topalov), and Dortmund in 2004. He has won the annually held Monaco Amber Blindfold and Rapid Chess Championships in years 1994, 1997, 2003, 2005 and 2006. He is the only player to have won five titles of the Corus chess tournament. He is also the only player to win the blind and rapid sections of the Amber tournament in the same year (and he did this twice — in 1997 and 2005). He is the first player to have achieved victories in each of the three big chess supertournaments: Corus (1998, 2003, 2004, 2006), Linares (1998), Dortmund (1996, 2000, 2004).
Anand has won the Chess Oscar in 1997, 1998, 2003, and 2004. The Chess Oscar is awarded to the year’s best player according to a world-wide poll of leading chess critics, writers, and journalists conducted by the Russian chess magazine 64.
His game collection, My Best Games of Chess, was published in the year 1998 and was updated in 2001.
World Chess Champion
After several near misses, Anand finally won the FIDE World Chess Championship in 2000 after defeating Alexei Shirov 3.5 – 0.5 in the final match held at Teheran, thereby becoming the first Indian to win that title. He lost the title when Ruslan Ponomariov won the FIDE knockout tournament in 2002.
He tied for second with Peter Svidler in the FIDE World Chess Championship 2005 with 8.5 points out of 14 games, lagging 1.5 points behind the winner, Veselin Topalov.
World Rapid Chess Champion
In October 2003, the governing body of chess, FIDE, organized a rapid time control tournament in Cap d’Agde and billed it as the World Rapid Chess Championship. Each player had 25 minutes at the start of the game, with an additional 10 seconds after each move. Anand won this event ahead of ten of the other top twelve players in the world, beating Kramnik in the final. Anand is widely regarded as the world’s finest Rapid Chess player. He has won countless major rapid chess events defeating all top players in the process. His main recent titles in this category are at: Corsica (6 yrs in a row from 1999-2005), Mainz (7 yrs in a row from 2000-2006), Leon 2005, Eurotel 2002, Fujitsu Giants 2002 and the Melody Amber (5 times — and he won the rapid portion of Melody Amber 7 times). In virtually all classical (regular time control) games that Anand plays, he has more time left than his opponent at the end of the game. In fact, he took advantage of the rule allowing players in time trouble to use dashes instead of the move notation during the last four minutes only once, in the game Anand – Svidler at the MTel Masters 2006 [3].
Chess titles
1983 National Sub-Junior Chess Champion – age 14
1984 International Master – age 15
1985 Indian National Champion – age 16
1987 World Junior Chess Champion, Grandmaster
2000 FIDE World Chess Champion
2003 FIDE World Rapid Chess Champion
Awards
Anand has received many awards.
– Arjuna award for Outstanding Indian Sportsman in Chess in 1985
– Padma Shri, National Citizens Award and Soviet Land Nehru Award in 1987
– The inaugural Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna Award, India’s highest sporting honour in the year 1991-1992.
– British Chess Federation ‘Book of the Year’ Award in 1998 for his book My Best Games of Chess
– Padma Bhushan in 2000
– Jameo de Oro the highest honour given by the Government of Lanzarote in Spain on 25th April 2001. The award is given only to illustrious personalities with extra ordinary achievements.
– Chess Oscar (1997, 1998, 2003 and 2004)
Further reading
Viswanathan Anand, My Best Games of Chess (Gambit, 2001 (new edition))
Source page: Wikipedia under Wikipedia license
