Vishy Anand: evaluation

Transcript context

…What is it they would do to you? Well, we would actually sit on the board and move the pieces ourselves. For the first time, they systematically went down a list and said, “If you’re going to play this opening, all these things have to be checked.” I had not thought like that before. My thing was, I’ll check the top two things, and I’ll figure out the rest, which was not as silly as it sounds today because back in the day, that’s how you played chess. Computers couldn’t play chess at all at that stage. For the first time, I thought in an organized way. I started to work. There are people opposite you who contradict you, who are strong enough to contradict you and tell you, “No, actually, I think you’re wrong here. You should think of this move,” or “This is better, that is better,” or “I once did this,” and what have you. You start to work like that on a systematic basis. I played my first Candidates match in January in Chennai against Dreev, and suddenly, I was paired against Karpov for the quarterfinals. That was going to be in Brussels in July, roughly a year since I qualified. Again, I worked with Gurevich, who had been on Kasparov’s team, and so on. I started working with him a lot. I had played Linares. I had played Munich. So, I’d suddenly started to play very strong tournaments and face this opposition regularly. Gurevich taught me lots of things. First of all, a lot of personal insights about Karpov. He always used to say when Karpov is fidgeting with his lips like this, it means he’s calculating, but he’s not quite sure what’s happening, and he’s nervous. Then you look for it, and you actually see the man fidgeting with his lips, and then you realize that his moves are shaky. It opens your eyes to the practical element. We worked very hard. Again, I think the level with him was one notch higher than what I had worked to with Van der Wiel and Hellers. One funny story. The first day, I asked Gurevich if I could watch — there was a Star Trek going on in the background. Would he mind if I watched that while we work? He said no. He said, “If you want to watch Star Trek, I’ll go to my house. You call me when it’s over. I’ll come back, but we’re not doing two things at the same time.” This was classic Star Trek.…

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