Vishy Anand: evaluation

Transcript context

…If you were playing Ivanchuk back then, when he was at his peak, younger, how would you approach that psychologically? Because he’s a very dangerous opponent, right? If he’s in the right mood, he can whip Magnus at five-minute chess. He is very dangerous, but there are some patterns. Actually, we met in the World Cadet, the Under-16 Championships in 1984. Then we kept bumping into each other. Actually, my initial score with him was quite positive. I think I’ve never had a negative score against him, but quite often, in painful moments, moments when I wasn’t expecting any danger from him, that’s when he would beat me. There’s a clear pattern. I wouldn’t call it underestimation, but you feel you’re wallowing in your strength, and you think it’ll probably work out fine; there’s no need to worry about all these things. And then, that’s when he would beat you. When you’re fully concentrated, his score is not so good. The solution suggested itself, but he was a tricky opponent all my life. The thing is, because I started out with an early plus score against him, he saw it as a stiff rivalry. Initially, I just thought, “Well, he’s Soviet, so he must be better than me.” I didn’t feel any rivalry. Then even when I got better than him, I didn’t switch into this, that he’s my rival. I kept thinking, “Well, we’re all rivals, but we’re all facing how to get to the World Championship,” but he felt it was a rivalry much more. Then the next year, Luis Rentero, the organizer of Linares — he organized a friendly match between Ivanchuk and me, and I beat him there. Slightly undeserved, in the sense of I didn’t get good positions, but I won them anyway. But that’s chess. I think it bugged him a lot. For many years, he would ignore the rest of the tournament. He almost couldn’t concentrate against the others. Then when he came against me, you knew he’d been waiting the whole week for this one game. It was annoying to have such a mark on your back. There’s this one guy who is just thinking of you all the time, while you’re thinking of all your opponents in a very organized fashion. Anyway, many years later, in Tata Steel in 2003, in Wijk aan Zee, I realized that he wasn’t even concerned about me anymore. Now, the new mark for him was Ponomariov, who had just beaten him. I felt relieved: “Okay, he can have Chucky.” Ivanchuk’s level can vary enormously. I think that was the tricky part in playing him, that you had to focus a bit harder than others. You couldn’t get by on just natural moves because he could be playing genius moves, or his level could drop a lot. He’s even more vulnerable, I think, psychologically than many others. If he’s not in the right frame of mind, his level can plummet. Equally, he can suddenly motivate himself to do great things. The hardest problem, even, is that he looks totally distracted during the game. That also lulls you into a false sense of security. With him, it’s always psychology, watching his face — things like that — which mattered more than the actual moves. 1995, to fast-forward, you beat Kasparov at the Intel Grand Prix. Legend has it, you spent only 10 minutes on your moves, and this was a slow classical game. How did you manage that? Why only 10 minutes?…

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