Vishy Anand: belief

Transcript context

…You’ve argued in your career you had a down period, something like 2011 to 2013. Until recently, Caruana seemed to have a down period for a while. Why does that happen to very top players? It’s very hard to explain. If you could even see it coming, you could start to think about it. My feeling is it catches most people off guard. They repeat a recipe probably too long. It’s not like anybody else spotted it coming. Suddenly you notice, “Hey, he’s not winning.” After one or two tournaments, you think, “He’s not winning quite as much as he used to, isn’t he?” Then you take a look, and you realize that slowly some resistance has built up in his game — resistance to the free flow, the most natural flow. But it’s very hard to see it coming. Then, when you’re stuck in it, it’s very hard to see how to get out of it. In most cases, at least in my experience, the way to get out of it is to stop thinking about how to solve it and almost lighten yourself and get back to playing a normal game for normal reasons. You’d think that method could be refined, and you could apply it systematically, but if it did, nobody would have slumps anymore in form. There is something clearly that we can’t quite pick up on. It’s a staleness that gets into your game. It’s probably an accumulation. If you’re doing too well for too long, others have been working nonstop trying to understand you. At some point, without you or them realizing it, the gap is closed. Then you’re encountering more resistance. You’re doing what worked perfectly before, but you’re encountering more resistance, and you can’t see why. Your opponents don’t understand why they’re not losing, but they suddenly think, “Hey, this worked out better for me.” Somehow the gap closes, and the time has come for you to move on, try something else, bring some fresh perspective. What’s your favorite Monty Python skit?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.