Chess = Viswanathan Anand

Viswanathan Anand (born 11 December 1969) is an Indian chess grandmaster and the current World Chess Champion.Anand won the FIDE World Chess Championship in 2000, at a time when the world title was split. He became the undisputed World Champion in 2007 and defended his title against Vladimir Kramnik in 2008. Anand is one of four players in history to break the 2800 mark on the FIDE rating list. He was at the top of the world rankings five out of six times, from April 2007 to July 2008.



He was taught to play chess by his mother. In his own words, "I started when I was six. My mother taught me how to play. In fact, my mother used to do a lot for my chess. We moved to the Philippines shortly afterward. I joined the club in India and we moved to the Philippines for a year. And there they had a TV program that was on in the afternoon, one to two or something like that, when I was in school. So she would write down all the games that they showed and the puzzles, and in the evening we solved them together. Of course my mother and her family used to play some chess, and she used to play her younger brother, so she had some background in chess, but she never went to a club or anything like that. So we solved all these puzzles and sent in our answers together. And they gave the prize of a book to the winner. And over the course of many months, I won so many prizes. At one point they just said take all the books you want, but don't send in any more entries."



Anand’s mother says that he has always had a photographic memory. She recalls how as a child of two he would pick up his favourite records and remember the songs in each to play on his father’s radiogram. He was a brilliant student throughout, and is a B.Com with honours from Loyola College in Chennai.



Anand was six years old when he first visited the Tal Chess Club in Chennai. Manuel Aaron, India’s first International Master would regularly play there and would hold classes for the members, basing his lessons on the tactics of the Soviet Grandmasters. Aaron says, Anand would regularly interrupt him and suggest alternative moves. “I looked upon him as a big nuisance because he wouldn’t allow me to complete my lectures.” Anand beat the legendary Aaron when he was only 13.



He has won the Arjuna Award and the Padma Shri, perhaps the youngest to do so. He has also been conferred with the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna Award. Anand, who lives with his wife Aruna in Spain’s Collado Mediano, is known as the ‘lightning kid’ on the Chess circuit. The standard time allotted to a Chess game is 120 minutes for 40 moves. He makes those moves in just half an hour! This nerve-wracking speed puts a lot of pressure on his opponents. Soviet Grandmaster Tukmanov once said of his lightning fast game, “ People play that fast in Coffee Shops!” He likes action films and loves Rock music.