You’ll bring the board?” asks Mrs Aruna Anand over the phone, “For we don’t have one at home.” Viswanathan Anand, the world champion, doesn’t own a chess set. I am not surprised. Over the past decade, computers have taken over India’s greatest export, storing billions of positions in giant databases.Long before you can set up the pieces, you can click through and search for games going back to 10th century Baghdad. Or you could fire up your browser and play “blitz”, chess at steroidal speeds, with an opponent across the globe. I had emailed Anand, saying it would make an interesting story to play against him and write about the experience.He agreed, and now his wife is on the phone to discuss the conditions of play, just as she has with the likes of Vladimir Kramnik and Veselin Topalov. We decide that I should bring the board and pieces, while Anand supplies the chess clock. A chess clock is basically two stopwatches linked to each other. When a player makes a move and presses a switch, he simultaneously stops his clock and starts the opponent’s.Old-fashioned analogues have given way to digital timers but both kinds invariably excite airport security. In movies, you often see the villain and the hero playing each other using elaborately carved pieces. For actual play such sets are impractical. Chess players are a conservative lot and top-level events prefer a type called the “Staunton”, which was first used in a London tournament held in 1851.FIDE, the world chess body, has clear rules and exact ratios for official sets. The pawn is the basic unit of measurement, for example, “the size of a square should be twice the diameter of a pawn’s base” or the king’s height is twice that of the pawn. Not that Anand or his peers on Olympus need boards. To them, the gross physical artefacts of wood and plastic are merely shadows of a struggle taking place in abstract dimensions, in an etheric plane where forces, energies, entities collide.To invert a quote, to them, matter is just a disease of the mind. The modalities are worked out, we are to play two games, with Anand under a time handicap. While I get 5 minutes with 2 seconds added for each move Anand will have 3 minutes with the same increment. The venue is to be a 29th floor penthouse overlooking the sea, on the outskirts of Chennai.In the words of JoePa, “The will to win is important, but the will to prepare is vital.” I have a week to get my game up to speed. How best can I take advantage of the time-odds? Do I play off-beat openings? Or mug up endgame theory? I decide to call in some help. First on my go-to list is FM Dennis Monokroussos, who publishes a highly regarded blog, TheChessMind.net. Dennis says, “My suggestion is to play against him as if you both had the same amount of time and had the same rating. Play your best openings. It will give you your best chance to score.”Match play demands a close study of your opponent. Taking a leaf out of Arjuna getting advice from Bhishma on the eve of Kurukshetra, I call up Grandmaster Peter Heine Nielsen. He has been Anand’s second or trainer for over five years apart from being a top-class player himself. The Dane is a key member of the “A-Team”, Anand’s crack unit of seconds helping the champ to victory over opponents like Boris Gelfand and Topalov. I brief him on my task, what do I need? “First of all, good luck,” he laughs.He goes into trainer mode, swiftly outlining the plan of action: “Stay solid. Avoid early contact of pieces. Make the game as long as possible. Any kind of tactics will be in his favour.” What opening should I essay? It is a bit late in the day to improve the middlegame or endgame but openings are the only area where I have some control.Crudely speaking, queen pawn or “closed“ openings lead to quiet, sustained positional struggles with a strong emphasis on strategy, while king pawn or “open” openings lead to bloody brawls with heavy tactics. To give tailored advice, Nielsen asks me the kind of openings I play. I cheerfully reply with names like the 19th century fan favourite Blackmar-Diemer Gambit.“Well, you don’t sound like the most solid guy ever,” he says doubtfully. But do I play something quiet or just try my natural game? “Well, it’s a choice,” he says. “If you want the experience, just play your normal game. I would think keeping it quiet is the way to go but okay, it’s Anand, there is no obvious remedy.”He concludes: “But trying to make the game long and making sure he will not win a knockout is the first step.” I normally don’t play closed openings. Should I still try? Dennis is emphatic: “Playing that would be a waste of your time — it’s not your style, you don’t know it, you won’t learn anything you’re going to use and it won’t cause him any problems whatsoever.”Dennis concludes: “Don’t play for tricks, unless that’s how you always play chess — be true to yourself.” All sports are mind games. Chess naturally has even more stratagems nested within like a matryoshka doll. I need some input from a specialist and call in Israeli IM Igor Bitensky, who is also a cognitive psychologist.Bitensky advises, “I would say you have to get it as complicated as possible. In a technical position you’ll have no chance. Attack his king,” he says. And as for time management, “Maybe you should just try to play as you have two minutes and not five.” What should my mind set be? “That ‘I should play an interesting game’,” he says.“And that ‘I have nothing to lose’,” he adds encouragingly. Except my pawns, I think gloomily. Is there any point in playing fast? “None at all!” says Nielsen.“He will play by hand; you need to think,” he concludes. He will play by hand, ominous words. I understand what Nielsen is saying, that Anand will just use “muscle memory” as it were. Still I take cheer in the words of Karpov, “If you don’t believe in victory, you have no business sitting down at a chess board.”A spectacular view of Chennai unfolds beneath our feet. The blue waters of the Bay of Bengal line the horizon. Earlier in the day, I had observed with amusement the “pre-game” feeling coming over me, familiar to all those who have played tournaments.A feeling where everything falls away, where everything narrows into a long tunnel of anticipation that takes you to the board. Game One We begin with the toss to see who gets white, and the advantage of the first move.As per age-old custom, I take a white pawn and a black pawn in my fists and after shuffling them a bit ask Anand to choose. He gets black. An imperceptible nod, and he starts the clock. I take a deep breath. And push the king pawn.The world champion responds instantly with his speciality, the hyper-complex Sicilian Defence. Instead of sticking to theory I push my queen pawn on the second move. Very quickly we reach a tabiya or battle array where black and white have castled on opposite sides. This is the preliminary to launching the respective armies at each other’s kings.Until this point, I’m satisfied. I’ve played hundreds of similar games on internet chess sites and I confidently hurl a pawn towards his king. What comes after is a decided shock. The c4 square is a crucial battleground in a Sicilian. Black often vectors his knights there, and the square is used as a jumping-off point for both sides. Hence control over it is a key battle in the war.In three moves, Anand acquires an iron grip over it, his knight tenanting itself there. He is playing instantaneously while I’m burning up more and more time. His queen, rook, bishop and knight all descend near my king. Checkmate! I look at the clock — I’ve run out of time while, thanks to the increment, Anand has more time than he started out with.After a game, players often conduct an autopsy to determine the cause of death, to explore other alternatives and outcomes. Normally, I would try to record the moves in my notepad but I know that nothing would have escaped Anand’s memory.Sure enough he replays the moves faultlessly. I wonder what he has to say at my attempt to catch him off guard with my irregular queen-pawn move? “Well, it’s obviously a mistake against c5,” he says, “It is just hopeless.”And as it turned out, he wasn’t caught off guard. He had seen it before, “in my first book on traps,” he says, referring to a book he had read at the age of eight. He then shows me a game played in a recent tournament which had an optically similar idea.“There are some crucial differences between what Magnus did and what you did,” he says with a hint of reproach, referring to Magnus Carlsen, the Norwegian wunderkind and current world No 1. “I would imagine so,” I agree. I mention that I could have tried to set up the Maroczy Bind (named after Hungarian GM Geza Maroczy). He immediately dishes out scads of analysis.“I could make it a kind of Sveshnikov-Kalashnikov [named after Russian GM Evgeny Sveshnikov],” he says. I am struck by how rarely he refers to individual moves. Instead, he simply sees the correct squares for his pieces, and works backward from there. It is a marriage of imagination and calculation — he deep-calculates but there is an underlying cosmic awareness of which pieces should occupy which squares. Is that an accurate model of his thinking? “Pretty much. I feel white’s structure is wrong,” he says. “The thing is when you started playing g4 Nf4 [referring to my attempted attack on his king], I knew that something would creak. But I wasn’t into details.”Like Michelangelo who saw the sculpture in a block of marble, he seems to see the game beneath the morass of variations as one preordained shape. Did he play the entire game on touch? “You are right. Basically I just played by finger. You could see it in my time management.” “Did you calculate at all?” I ask. He mentions a queen move right at the denouement.“That was probably the only move in the game I thought,” he says. He could have delivered checkmate one move earlier, but made a slight misstep. “Have you always had this ‘touch’?” “I think everyone has it. It is just that my fingers are faster than yours, in a sense. And I’m able to take in more details with every look. But clearly the more I look the more details I start to take in. And I mean that also the more years you have, the more experience — the more plots you see, the more ideas you see. That is more or less the theme of Hendriks’ book,” he says referring to Move First, Think Later by Willy Hendriks, a sort of Malcolm Gladwell of the chess world. “Hendriks says nobody thinks like Kotov, that’s a myth,” explains Anand.Alexander Kotov was a Grandmaster and founder of the Soviet chess school. Kotov brought in dialectic fervour into the royal game. He recommended a search for candidate moves in a given position. Each candidate move could have one or more responses. Each response could in turn branch off into counter-responses and so on. An “analysis tree” would be created, an infinite, endlessly branching tree, a vast phylogenetic forest of the mind. Anand deconstructs Kotov, “The forest of variations, that sounds lovely as an explanation after the game but nobody thinks like that during the game. It is a procedure that is automatic. Nobody is thinking in logical steps. We just take in huge gulps of information and we work with that.”Game Two After the debacle, I decide to go easy on the pawn-to-pawn combat. When the champ opens with the queen pawn, I opt for the Czech variation of the Benoni defence. It is not highly regarded by experts but is sedate and predictable. As a boy, I had a faded copy of English GM Hartston’s monograph on the Czech. In those pre-internet days, chess books were phenomenally expensive and we all photocopied each other’s meagre libraries.After repeated Xeroxing, deciphering the moves was a challenge, we would peer like some archaeologist decoding tablets of long lost civilisations. Hartston today is probably remembered for his famous quote, “Chess doesn’t drive people mad, it keeps mad people sane.” Once again, we castle on opposite sides. I sacrifice a pawn to open up lines of attack against his king. He in turn lines up his forces on my king — but this time I am able to pause his first wave of attack. Low on time, I am reduced to moving my pieces based on vague general principles. Trying to drum up an attack, I blunder away an exchange and the rest of the game is an efficient mopping-up operation. I’ve played well below even my normal level.Later, I realise that the disconcerting speed of Anand was a decisive factor. He has taken eight to 11 seconds for the entire game while I’ve run out of all my allotted five minutes. I’m forced to continually react to his moves, culminating in a reactive spiral of death. Military strategist John Boyd coined the OODA loop or Observe, Orient, Decide and Act. Boyd used it to show the recurring cycle of decision-making.In technical terms, Anand is well inside my OODA loop, constantly advancing his own agenda to the detriment of mine. Post-mortem: After the game, I ask him whether he remembers Hartston’s book. “Very much,” he replies. “I grew up with the Czech Benoni. Till 1985-86, I was playing it very often. Then I had this moment, where I thought I must learn a real opening and I switched to the Queen’s Indian in ’86 just before the World Junior.”In the post-mortem, he races through the variations, banging down the pieces with emphasis. Like all top players, he is utterly objective, cold-bloodedly dissecting his game, noting his own occasional mistakes. He shows a knight foray into my territory as the only move he thought a bit. “As soon as I made it I regretted it,” he adds, pointing a tactical shot he missed, his fingers dancing over the chessboard, a balletic blur of pieces and pawns in the golden afternoon light.Game over. We drive back, plunging through rush-hour traffic. Vsevolod Pudovkin’s delightful movie Chess Fever features a hero who is completely obsessed by chess — to the extent that he cannot cross a chequered floor without hopping like a knight. Or there is Vladimir Nabokov’s description in his novel The Defense, “Luzhin’s thought roamed through entrancing and terrible labyrinths, meeting there and now the anxious thought of Turati, who sought the same thing as he.” In popular culture such monomania has long been associated with the game. Anand points out the scientific calculator app in his phone and tries to figure out the number of factorials it can calculate.In 2010, he was a guest of honour at the International Congress of Mathematicians, held in Hyderabad. The highlight of that event was Anand playing chess simultaneously with 40 of the world’s top mathematicians (he won 39, drew 1). Ever since he read Carl Sagan’s Cosmos as a child, he has had an abiding interest in the heavens. He subscribes to a service called Global-Rent-a-Scope (GRAS) which enables him to use robotic telescopes across the world to take photographs of deep sky objects (the Lagoon Nebula in Sagittarius is a favourite).“I was absolutely blown away when they found that galaxy with a black hole with a mass 17 billion times that of the sun,” he says, referring to the recent discovery of what lurked at the heart of galaxy NGC 1277. He explains that the discovery has wrecked the empirical scaling relations between black holes and their galactic hosts. This leads to a freewheeling conversation on rogue planets (Anand is sceptical about the detection techniques), the Oort Cloud (icy objects at the extreme edge of the solar system), viability of Nasa’s plan of capturing asteroids, the neutrino detection facility being built in Tamil Nadu and so on. “I’ll mail the games to you in the evening,” he says.Normally he would just enter the moves in the software engine of his mobile. A thought suddenly strikes me, “Would you lose if you played against your cellphone?” “Probably,” he says. “That is pretty depressing.” “It was depressing” he agrees. “Now we are used to it.” He thinks for a moment. “Well if I just played not to lose, I might survive.”Postscript It is night and I cannot sleep. Knights, bishops, rooks march across the ceiling. My mind obsessively replays the games. I try logging onto an online chess server and play but my heart is not in it. After seeing such mathematical perfection, such purity — after you have played the Truth, nothing can be the same again.

What Makes Anand a Chess Maestro

Depending on the situation, he can calculate up to 10 to 15 moves ahead.He has a deep knowledge of recurring patterns and has a pre-loaded database of up to 200,000 patterns. Once a position appears on the board, which conforms to such a pattern, he will automatically know the typical motifs, options and plans.By age of 15, he had already memorised two volumes of the ECO or Encyclopaedia of Chess Openings. Each volume is around 300 pages.30-40 positions per minute.In blitz, can play near faultlessly at 30 moves a minute.After just the first two moves, there are 72,804 possible moves. He has complete knowledge of all the commonly occurring openings. For both White and Black, he has an extremely profound understanding of the 5 to 7 opening systems that he mainly plays.Anand's first GM scalp came at the age of 15, in a tournament in London. Against a sharp line of the Sicilian Dragon, Anand overpowered the English Grandmaster.For Indian chess fans in the 80s, the million-dollar question was who was going to be the first Grandmaster from the country. Thipsay was a major rival to Anand. This win came during that critical time.Long before the world championship, Anand showed his stamp by annexing the world junior title. This win against his closest rival is doubly important for Ivanchuk continues to be a redoubtable opponent.Anand seized the crown of champion in the Mexico tournament. With black he defeated his bete noire Aronian by trapping his rook in a fine display of counter-attacking chess.In a tense encounter with the boorish Bulgarian, Vishy shows vintage style. He blasts open Topalov’s kingside with a breathtaking knight sacrifice. An important result, as the game was part of a world championship match.When asked about his greatest game Anand jokingly pointed to this blitz victory over American Larry Christiansen. Anand battled two queens with just his king and knight. In the end he gives checkmate with his sole surviving knight while the pawns hem in the enemy king.Magnus Carlsen is the current No 1, and is dubbed the “Mozart of Chess”. In the legendary Linares tournament, Anand coordinates all his pieces to rout the Norwegian in a symphony of destruction.Karjakin, Russian wunderkind, attacks Vishy’s Sicilian Defence. He retaliates by sacrificing knight, bishop and rook to deliver checkmate.It was the strongest tournament at the time. Annoyed at a loss in the previous game, Anand throws caution to the winds in what is called one of the greatest attacking games of all time.In this gathering of chess legends, Anand shone, and his win over Kasparov with the black pieces showed that the Indian had definitely arrived.(The author is a freelance writer)