Viswanathan Anand has for the second year running been outclassed in the World Chess Championship by a player nearly 20 years his younger. At 23, Magnus Carlsen is without doubt a prodigy who is likely to rule the chess world for a while. That is of course until the next genius comes along. At 44, four-time world champion Anand is possibly reaching the twilight of his career.
Winning against the likes of Carlsen and other younger players is increasingly going to get tougher. Indeed, many were surprised that Anand managed to qualify as a challenger to the world title after the hammering he took in last year’s world championship against Carlsen in Chennai. But he also surprised many by performing much better at Sochi this year than he did in his hometown in 2013. Things could have been very different too had Anand taken advantage of a Carlsen blunder in Game 6 of this year’s championship.
In the coming years Anand will find it difficult to stay at the top. Though chess might not be a physical sport (and some might be loath to call it a sport at all!) in the sense most other sports are, the burnout age is rapidly becoming much younger. Indeed, the current world number two is Italian Fabiana Caruna who is a year younger than Carlsen.
It has, of course, not always been like this. Victor Korchnoi won the right to challenge Anatoly Karpov to the world title in 1978 at the age of 47 and again in 1981 when he was 50. But that was a different era in more ways than one. The championship games were played out against the backdrop of the Cold War and had plenty of backroom intrigue, something that is missing today.
There were no live telecasts like today. During game 7 of this year’s world championship only hard-core chess enthusiasts could have sat through the six-hour, 122-move (the second-most in world championship history) affair. But things were very different during the days of Karpov and Korchnoi. Much of the intrigue surrounding the Karpov-Korchnoi matches was due to the fact that Korchnoi was the first grandmaster to defect from the Soviet Union. Korchnoi, who had systematically been discriminated against by Soviet authorities, sought political asylum in Holland in 1976 while playing a tournament there. Subsequently he settled in Switzerland.
During the 1978 world championship match held in the Philippines, there was plenty of drama off the board. There were initially protests about the flags being used on the board. But some of the more bizarre complaints were of hypnotism being employed by the players. There was also talk of snacks containing secret codes. The contest, however, proved to be even with Karpov winning 6-5 with 21 draws.
Before the Karpov-Korchnoi rivalry there was the intriguing Bobby Fischer, one of the greatest ever chess players. As an American, his matches played right into the Cold War narrative. When Fischer defeated Boris Spassky in the 1972 world championship in Reykjavik and overturned the Soviet dominance in chess, it was hailed as the “match of the century.” Fischer was breathlessly covered in the American press. On his return to America he was feted as a hero and even appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated.
When the mercurial Fischer forfeited the right to play Karpov in the 1975 world championship, he made even bigger news. Subsequently Fischer disappeared for long periods of time, eventually to seek asylum in Iceland where he died in 2008. The rivalry between Karpov and Garry Kasparov also took on legendary proportions.
When Kasparov defeated Karpov to win the world title in 1985, he became at 22 years the youngest ever world chess champion. Kasparov got the better of Karpov again in 1987, but in 1993 he broke with chess’ governing authority, FIDE, to form the Professional Chess Association (PCA). Unlike Karpov, Kasparov was an anti-establishment figure, quitting chess in 2005 to enter politics.
The formation of the PCA led to the odd situation where there were two champions for 13 years. In 1995, Kasparov defended his PCA title by defeating Anand in a much-publicised match held in the World Trade Centre in New York. However, when Anand won the 2007 world title he was the “undisputed” champion since that year the world championship had been reunified.
Despite the two world title losses, Anand remains a chess legend, being the only player to win the chess world championship in three different formats: match, tournament and knockout. At the same time he has been instrumental in triggering an interest in chess in India that went beyond leisurely rounds of shatranj in one’s drawing room or in the park. Though India is regarded as the birthplace of chess, for long it had figured nowhere in the international chess scene. During the Soviet era, clubs named after Russian chess legends were set up in Indian metros to train youngsters. The first of these was the Tal Chess Club in Chennai in 1972, followed by the Botvinnik Chess Club in Mumbai and Delhi and finally the Alekhine Club in Kolkata.
Many of India’s best chess players were initiated into chess in these clubs. But arguably after Anand became India’s first grandmaster in 1988, it provided a huge impetus to chess in India. Three years later, Dibyendu Barua became India’s second grandmaster. Since then India has produced over 30 grandmasters, including excellent woman players such as Koneru Humpy. Humpy is currently ranked number three in the world, having become a grandmaster in 2002 at the age of 15.
There is, however, no one yet on the horizon, who is ready to step out of Anand’s considerable shadow.
The writer, a senior research fellow at ISAS and ARI, National University of Singapore, has finished writing a book on Indian sport
