Viswanathan Anand: Listen to Yourself and Everything Else Will Follow

Image: Dinesh Krishnan

Am I paranoid? I think it is normal because you always have worries and when you are paranoid you start to sense the problems that could arise. Generally, the worse problems occur to me when I go [to tournaments] blissfully unaware of everything. When everything is going right then you should feel worried because it is perhaps a sign that you haven’t picked up on something.

I had the worst result of my career in the second half of 2001. My confidence was undermined so much that it took me months to get it back. And at this stage, I think I tried out almost everything. I tried switching openings, making a couple of things better, but nothing really seemed to work. Though it wasn’t disastrous, performance-wise I wasn't incredibly alarmed, but I knew that was not the way I played chess. I lost my world title in December 2001.

I think it’s important to analyse my games and figure out what is going on. It is important to take risks for success, but afterwards look at the games objectively. Did I win because I posed him problems he couldn’t solve? Or did I get away this time because of my reputation? And if there are some obvious mistakes that I made and my opponents blinked and let it pass out of respect, they will eventually go back home and figure out that I am bluffing. So then, could I do it again and again?

In 2000-2001, I had a long stretch of success but my games in early 2001 were incredibly unconvincing. I was lucky here; I made mistakes but my results held up. There were already some warning signs and in fact I told Aruna that I am not happy with the way I am playing because I am just making too many mistakes. But you can’t get the seriousness in because you still tell yourself: I must be doing something right. Again there were a slew of inaccuracies but my opponents let me get away with it then. In June, I played Kramnik in a rapid match and I think this is one of the worst matches I have played, but I still won. I think I should have remembered that I got away only because he was having difficulty in putting me away under severe time pressure. But in a classical game, there is no way he would be under that kind of time pressure. But it kind of drifted and the next thing you know, Boom!

It is only when the tide goes out that you see who is swimming naked. The one thing I learned is to be objective and make changes before they are absolutely necessary. If things are going your way for a long time then there are a lot of things that you have not spotted. So maybe you are competitively very strong but your opening work is not going very well. Success can mask a lot of things.

You make the changes not because you are afraid something might go wrong in the future but because you want to discover new things about chess. Between 2003 and 2005, I had the chance to enjoy chess without any pressure so there was no clock ticking; because the World Championship wasn’t around. And you know that you might have the odd bad result but there will be a next round and I will work hard, but I really enjoyed chess in those years. And that is probably the biggest thing. I think everything else flows from it. There is almost nothing of competitive use that you are going to hate doing.

Failure is often a good wake up call. It is like cold water in your face. The first thing is to see what you have done wrong. Again there is a difference between one failure and a string of failures. And the second thing is just to do the work on the chess board. And I try to work on the new stuff. Generally I play my best and I have the least difficulty in remembering my moves when I am doing something new and fascinating. If you are doing the same stuff over and over again, even if your competitor doesn’t pick [it] up, then it gets boring.

In 2007, [at the]Corus tournament, [I] lost two black games to Topalov and to Kramnik. I couldn’t even really understand why I lost. And this was slightly alarming. It was not as big a crisis as 2001, but [it was still] a mini crisis. And then for the rest of that year, I spent [my time] working more or less only on black. I understood that I had not been catching up to the latest methods. People were [bringing] in a lot of new and interesting ways and I didn’t know it. So before the next tournament, I didn’t try to do things in a hurry. Just this information was valuable. In 2001 some specific problems had started to appear but because my results were good I let it go. This time I didn’t. This really illustrates how those two years developed.

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