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Chess Profiles : Viswanathan Anand


Grandmaster Viswanathan Anand is quite simply, the greatest sportsman India has ever produced.

Grandmaster Viswanathan Anand's spectacular career is reproduced here. Keep checking back for updates.

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Viswanathan Anand (born December 11, 1969) is an Indian chess grandmaster and the current World Chess Champion.

Anand won the FIDE World Chess Championship in 2000, at a time when the world title was split. His win in the World Chess Championship 2007 has made him the undisputed World Champion since 2007. In a 2008 article for Time Magazine, Anand expressed satisfaction that the World Championship title had come back to India, the country where Chess originated. [1] He will defend his title in the World Chess Championship 2008 against Vladimir Kramnik in October-November 2008.

Anand has been top of the world rating list since April 2007, is one of four players in history to break the 2800 mark on the FIDE rating list, and has been among the top three ranked players in the world continuously since 1997.

In 2007 he was awarded the second highest civilian award of India, the Padma Vibhushan.

Chess career

Early 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 chess champion and won that title two more times. He played games at blitz speed. 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. He was awarded Padhma Shri at the age of 18.

"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 the World Chess Championship 1993 cycle Anand qualified for his first Candidates Tournament, winning his first match but narrowly losing his quarter-final match to Anatoly Karpov.[2]

In 1994-95 Anand and Gata Kamsky dominated the qualifying cycles for the rival FIDE and PCA world championships. In the FIDE cycle (FIDE World Chess Championship 1996), Anand lost his quarter-final match to Kamsky after leading early.[3] Kamsky went on to make championship match against Karpov.

In the 1995 PCA cycle, Anand won matches against Oleg Romanishin and Michael Adams without a loss, then avenged his FIDE loss by defeating Gata Kamsky in the Candidates final.[4] In 1995, he played the PCA World Chess Championship 1995 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 with a powerful exchange sacrifice, but then lost four of the next five. He lost the match 10.5 - 7.5.

World Chess Champion

After several near misses, Anand won the FIDE World Chess Championship in 2000 for the first time after defeating Alexei Shirov 3.5 - 0.5 in the final match held at Tehran, 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, 1.5 points behind the winner, Veselin Topalov.

In September 2007 Anand became World Champion again by winning that year's FIDE World Championship Tournament held in Mexico City. He won the double round-robin tournament with a final score of 9 out of 14 points, a full point ahead of joint second place finishers Vladimir Kramnik and Boris Gelfand.

In 2000, when Anand won the FIDE World Championship, there was also the rival "Classical" World Championship, held by Kramnik. By 2007, the world championship had been reunified, so Anand's victory in Mexico City made him undisputed World Chess Champion. He became the first undisputed champion to win the title in a tournament, rather than in matchplay, since Mikhail Botvinnik in 1948.

Anand is scheduled to defend the title against Kramnik in a match in 2008. In October 2007, Anand said he liked the double round robin championship format, and that the right of Kramnik to automatically challenge for the title was "ridiculous".[5]

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. His main recent titles in this category are at: Corsica (six years in a row from 1999 through 2005), Mainz (seven years in a row from 2000 through 2006), Leon 2005, Eurotel 2002, Fujitsu Giants 2002 and the Melody Amber (five times – and he won the rapid portion of Melody Amber seven times). In the Melody Amber 2007, Anand did not lose a single game in the rapid section, and scored 8.5/11, two more than the runners-up. His performance in the rapid section was 2939.[6] In most tournament time control games that Anand plays, he has more time left than his opponent at the end of the game. He lost on time in one game, to Gata Kamsky. Otherwise, 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. [7]

Other results

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 has won the Chess Oscar in 1997, 1998, 2003, 2004, and 2007 becoming the third non-Russian player, after Bent Larsen of Denmark and Bobby Fischer of USA, to win the Oscar. 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.

Anand's recent tournament successes include the Corus chess tournament in 2006 (tied with Veselin Topalov), Dortmund in 2004, and Linares in 2007. 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, 2007, 2008), Dortmund (1996, 2000, 2004).

In 2007 he won the Grenkeleasing Rapid championship, which he won for the tenth time defeating Armenian GM Levon Aronian. Incidentally, just a few days before Aronian had defeated Anand in the Chess960 final. In March 2007, Anand won the Linares chess tournament and it was widely believed that he would be ranked world No.1 in the FIDE Elo rating list for April 2007. However, Anand was placed No.2 in the initial list released because the Linares result was not included. FIDE subsequently announced that the Linares results would be included after all,[8] making Anand number one in the April 2007 list.[9]

Anand won the Mainz 2008 Supertournament Championship by defeating upcoming star Magnus Carlsen.[10]

Rating

In the April 2007 FIDE Elo rating list, Anand was ranked first in the world for the first time,[11] and (as of July 2008) he has held the number one spot since then.

He is the sixth person to head the rating list since its inception in 1970; the other five being Fischer, Karpov, Kasparov, Kramnik and Topalov.

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,
  • 1988 Grandmaster
  • 2000 FIDE World Chess Champion
  • 2003 FIDE World Rapid Chess Champion
  • 2007 FIDE World Chess Champion (Undisputed)

Awards

Anand has received many awards.

External Links:

Courtesy : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viswanathan_Anand

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