Vishy Anand: evaluation

Transcript context

…What goes on inside your head during a match that no normal human could guess at? Surprisingly, how distracted we are. During a match, even in very critical moments, I’ll be thinking what I can have for dinner, what I should have done yesterday, oh, I met that jerk yesterday, and this kind of stuff. Your brain wanders off. It’s almost like taking your foot off the gas. Your brain wants to wander off for a while. You let it, and then you come back. Or you keep one part focused on what’s happening, but while your opponent is thinking you can wander off. Whenever somebody tells me, “I don’t know how you concentrate for seven hours,” I understand that they don’t know how we play chess, or that they haven’t played chess themselves because we do not concentrate for seven hours. Very few people do it. I would think even the brain simply goes on strike periodically and then comes back. I think that’s how it works. 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?…

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