Vishy Anand: evaluation

Transcript context

…Does Fischer Random have a future, or it’s just a side thing forever? Fischer Random actually has a brilliant future because it’s a form of chess which has not been understood at all. Fischer Random was conceived as a way of avoiding opening theory. Later on, people rediscovered it as a way of avoiding computers. Now, we realize we are not avoiding computers at all. They’re just as good at Fischer Random or No Castling as they are at chess. New versions, we are never going to catch up with computers. But for playing amongst ourselves, this is completely new territory, and there’s a lot of scope for creativity and everything we used to look for. It’s a variant with a lot of promise, maybe the one chess players are most comfortable with. However, in the meantime, I have played No Castling a few times. That turns out to be fascinating. The first time I sat with my computer, and I had to play knight f3, rook g1, and repeated four corners, all four rooks and knights so that white couldn’t castle anymore, and then switch on the engine and analyze openings like this. I realized that almost every opening can be reevaluated if your king can’t castle. Everywhere the right plan turns out to be h4, h5, rook h4 thing, except the ones where it’s not. There are no general rules yet, or we have not come that far, so we find every little detail. Now, there are lots of other versions that are coming up, and you can have as many as you dream of. You can have pawns moving sideways, pawns capturing straight and moving diagonally. You can have every variant you want. You program it into the computer and let it play a million games and see what pops out. This may be a solution for the distant future, but for the moment, chess looks healthy enough, especially if you vary. People who have played too much classical chess have a round of faster controls, and then when you’ve done too many faster controls, you go back to classical. If you keep varying like this, that’s one thing that keeps the game moving along. The second thing that works very well is, for instance, what they do in Tata Steel, which is to have a mixed field. Not all super-prepared top GMs, but a mixture of very courageous young juniors with top GMs. You have that mix that also leads to a lot of unpredictability. If you keep moving around, you change the format, change the variant, change the time control, change this, change that, you just keep shuffling, we can go on for quite some time. Is there a chance that 10 years from now, say, rapid play is the World Chess Championship?…

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