Viswanathan Anand: Listen to Yourself and Everything Else Will Follow
 |
|
Image: Dinesh Krishnan
|
|
THE SHIELD His wife, Aruna, is his manager and emotional support
|
In 2007, I won the World Championship which I am retaining till date and in 2001 I lost the World Championship and kind of drifted away. That’s the parallel.
Every once in a while you have to outfox your opponent. I think the risks that you take and which are enjoyable are those where you are learning new things about the game and then you want to try it out. I find that those kind[s] of risks generally play off well.
There is other stuff where you learn to distinguish, for example, in the 12th game I think Topalov took a very unacceptable risk. It is because he missed some particular move but usually the bungle-up is because the match has been so tense for so long that you do something. That’s not risk taking but just nerves in a certain way. So you try very hard to avoid the second type. But equally, it is very difficult to draw a very clear line between the two. If he had won the match, he would be giving the same lecture on how his risk had paid off and was a controlled risk. So there is this sort of unprepared risk that you want to take [once] in a while but you have to be aware [of] what you are doing. You can’t fool yourself.
If you don’t have self belief, then you could have the best preparation in the world, but there will always come a moment when you hesitate, you make the second best move, you make a move where the risk is lower and you slowly lose space. It is important to prepare every single line up till the end. But you should also be ready at some point to start fighting. In the end, it is all about self-belief. No work is ever going to be near perfect, so you should always have some element of doubt. But then you must find a way to slowly disconnect yourself from those problems. That’s why I go for a nap with the idea that whatever I have done I will park it there, and go to sleep and then shower, eat something light and go to the game.
You don’t want to be surprised but not at the cost of your confidence. That is the balance that you look for. For instance, let’s take the last match in Sofia. I lost Game 1. It hit me hard of course, but everyone told me 'you were pretty calm that day'. And the thing is that if you have enough experience, then you know it is life and then you park it there. The worst thing is to get emotionally unstable and angry and too excited. The thing is to calm yourself down and go to the next game. So we played Game 2 and my experience has told me that once you play Game 2 and even if it is a draw you will still be calm the rest of the day, and then it will heal with the third game and so on.
I think when I started to get close to Game 6, 7 and 8, I was leading by points and it looked like I was dominating the match but my experience told me that it would actually start getting tougher for me. Because I could see that the opponents were putting pressure especially on my black openings, and somehow I was not getting the kind of positions I wanted to get. In fact, I lost the 8th game, and drew the 9th which I was winning. And so it was tough, but maybe I was able to contain the damage. If I had not been expecting it, then it could have been much worse. So it is almost like I had the premonition of which stage of the match [would] not [be] going very well.
Blind spots may never go away. They remain with you since childhood. You just get better at covering or masking them over time. But if you are put under enough pressure, you will make the same mistakes. The blunders I make, I can find a game from childhood and they will be exactly the same. [They are] the same kind of blind spots, [and] they never go away. If I work on a weak spot of mine, it just makes it a lot less weaker, it doesn’t completely go away and very rarely does it become my strong point. That’s because our nature doesn’t change very much and I think that’s what you look for when you are playing an opponent. For instance, I would say that when I play Topalov I generally work with the assumption that he is someone who tries to take a lot of risks. As long as I am willing to wait patiently, at some point he may push too far and I have to be ready to punish him. You put them under enough pressure, then they crack and these old blunders come up again.
Single Page View
to Chessdom Forums & Indian
Chess Updates of facebook.
