Vishy Anand: belief

Transcript context

…Last two questions. There are so many talented young chess players from Tamil Nadu. Obviously, you know them, you play with them. And if you’re looking for who will really climb to the top, like Pragga and Gukesh, other than just how well they play at the moment, what else do you look for? If they’re very young, I want to see a certain amount of fanaticism. I think fanaticism is good when you’re in your teens, but quite a few of them have that. I think maturity is maybe the most important thing because Pragga and Gukesh have taken some horrible blows. What I’ve realized is that they’re quite strong in a way that I’m amazed, maybe because for me, losing hurts so much more. I can no longer understand people who are relaxed about losing. Maybe I was once more relaxed, I don’t know. Pragga and Gukesh both have taken some of the tough times recently quite well and come out of it. Now they’re both going gangbusters, and that’s great, but they’ve had difficult times as well. There are things I look for on the chessboard, a sense that they understand a lot of stuff without having to . . . Just like I mentioned earlier, they know where the pieces go. If I look at their games, I can quickly get a sense of which area they’re focused in. Some of them have no understanding of chess at all, but they have amazing sporting qualities, which is that they’re tenacious, they’re able to keep resisting. You can see that they don’t have this dip of being annoyed with themselves about the position and therefore their performance goes down. If anything, they are still finding only moves. They’re still hanging in there. Some things like this will alert me to some sporting qualities, but the chess qualities, I think, I look for first. If not, I wonder, “They don’t have this. What could they possibly bring to the table that compensates for it?” Then I realize, ah, they have these other sporting qualities, maybe even their fitness, their ability to hang in there, things like that. Last question, where’s the best place to eat in Chennai?…

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