Viswanathan Anand

◇The boy from Madras

Viswanathan Anand was born on 11 December 1969 in Mayiladuthurai, Tamil Nadu, and grew up in Madras — today's Chennai. He learned the game at six from his mother Sushila, a keen chess enthusiast, and sharpened it during the years his family spent in Manila, where his father worked as a railways consultant. From the start his gift was speed: he saw combinations almost before the pieces had settled, and the chess world soon gave him a name for it.

In Mind Master, written with Susan Ninan, Anand recalled how his mother helped him learn in Manila. While he was at school, she noted down the positions shown on the television program Chess Today. They solved its closing puzzle together and mailed their answer. The prize was a chess book, and Anand won so often that the station invited him to take books from its library on condition that he stop sending answers. His mother's work gave him a growing supply of games and ideas to study.

In September 1987, at seventeen, he won the World Junior Championship in Baguio City, the first Asian ever to win a world chess title. The grandmaster title followed in 1988, when he secured his third and final norm with a draw in the penultimate round of the Shakti Finance tournament in Coimbatore to become the first Indian grandmaster in history. He described the sequence of missed and completed norms in chapter 2 of Mind Master.

◇The Lightning Kid

The nickname Lightning Kid belonged to his teenage years. At the Tal Chess Club in Madras, five-minute games followed a winner-stays-on rule: Anand often kept his seat while his opponents changed. In chapter 7 of Mind Master, he explained that his quick first impressions also required work. Evgeny Bareev noticed how much he could see in the first minute, but also how difficult he found it to develop that initial assessment. Studying positions in which he had missed resources helped him learn when to calculate more deeply. At the turn of 1991–92 he won the big tournament at Reggio Emilia ahead of both the reigning World Champion Garry Kasparov and the former champion Anatoly Karpov, proof that the kid from Madras belonged with the very best.

The climb after that was steady and relentless. In April 2006 he became only the fourth player in history to cross 2800 Elo, and in April 2007 he reached world No. 1, a position he would hold for twenty-one months. His peak rating of 2817 came in March 2011. Across his career he won the Corus/Wijk aan Zee supertournament five times, Linares three times, a record eleven Mainz rapid titles, and the World Rapid Championship in both 2003 and 2017.

◇The long road to the crown

He had to wait for the title. In 1995 he challenged Kasparov for the PCA World Championship at the top of the World Trade Center in New York, took an early lead, then fell away as the champion struck back, a hard lesson in what it takes to win a title match.

Another challenge followed in January 1998 at Lausanne. After winning the three-week Groningen knockout, Anand faced Karpov, who had been admitted directly to the final. Kasparov criticizes that unequal preparation in My Great Predecessors, Part V. Anand won the sixth classical game to level the match at 3–3, then lost both rapid playoff games.

In 2000 he won the FIDE World Championship, beating Alexei Shirov 3½–½ in the final.

But the title in those years was split, and Anand wanted the whole of it. He got it in 2007 at Mexico City, winning the World Championship tournament with 9/14, undefeated, to become the 15th undisputed World Chess Champion and the first Asian to hold that title. As he explained in chapter 1 of Mind Master, Kramnik had reunited the divided championships in 2006.

◇The reign

Then he defended the title the old-fashioned way, in matches against the best challengers the world could send. In 2008 at Bonn he beat Vladimir Kramnik 6½–4½, outpreparing the most thorough champion of the age. In 2010 at Sofia, in perhaps his finest hour, he held off Veselin Topalov 6½–5½, winning the final game with Black under maximum pressure. In 2012 at Moscow he survived a very close match with Boris Gelfand, tied after twelve classical games, and kept the title in the rapid tiebreak, 2½–1½.

Bonn completed his world-title victories in knockout, tournament and match formats. In chapter 1 of Mind Master, he described the decision to switch from his usual 1.e4 to 1.d4 against Kramnik. Learning new positions gave him fresh problems to solve and a way to surprise an opponent who knew his games closely. He and his team spent the following year preparing the change.

Reaching Sofia in 2010 was itself an ordeal. In chapter 10 of Mind Master, Anand described how the volcanic ash cloud that grounded European flights forced his team to travel roughly 2,000 kilometers by road from Germany, through Austria, Hungary and Romania into Bulgaria. They arrived after more than forty hours, watching The Lord of the Rings along the way. With ten minutes of the final film left, they asked the driver to circle the hotel twice before letting them out.

Only in 2013, in his home city of Chennai, did the crown finally pass, to the young Norwegian Magnus Carlsen; a rematch in Sochi the following year ended the same way. Anand had held the championship for six years and defended it three times — and at an age when most champions had long since faded, he kept right on competing with the elite, winning the Candidates Tournament in 2014.

His return to the title match had begun with doubts about entering the Candidates at all. In chapter 12 of Mind Master, he recalled Kramnik persuading him to play after the loss in Chennai. Anand expected to finish last. Instead, a 91-move draw with Sergey Karjakin in the penultimate round secured first place with a round to spare and another match against Carlsen.

◇The gentleman of chess

Anand belonged to no particular school: he was a universal player whose strength was clarity rather than any single weapon. What set him apart from his fiercest contemporaries was that he never tried to intimidate anyone. He avoided psychological warfare and gamesmanship, and he received preparation help from Kasparov, Kramnik and Carlsen for his 2010 title defense. In chapter 10 of Mind Master, he distinguished their contributions: Kramnik analyzed openings remotely, Kasparov supplied calls and notes, and Carlsen played training games with him before the match. In a 2008 interview with Der Spiegel, he described the effort of controlling his emotions at the board: "Confidence is very important – even pretending to be confident."

Off the board he married Aruna in 1996 — she became his manager and traveling companion through the championship years — and their son Akhil was born in 2011. In chapter 6 of Mind Master, he credited her handling of contracts, travel and team logistics with freeing him to concentrate on preparation. India showered him with honours: the inaugural Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna, the Padma Shri, the Padma Bhushan, and in 2007 the Padma Vibhushan, the country's second-highest civilian award and never before given to a sportsperson. He won the Chess Oscar six times. Yet for all the medals, what his peers remember is the man: unfailingly modest, endlessly curious, and incapable of unkindness at the board.