The Other World Of Professional Chess Players

Image: V Krishnaswamy / Moscow

KNIGHTS OR KINGS Boris Gelfand (left) with Viswanathan Anand and his wife Aruna

Caged inside a Glassed Room, they resemble gladiators on a stage, separated from the outside world, as it were, by thick glass panels that keep noises out. When they get up and survey the board  from a few feet away, they walk ever so slowly, like tigers on a prowl, circling their victim before going for the kill.

But in reality, the generals, Viswanathan Anand and Boris Gelfand, have neither swords nor shields but weapons merely mental in nature. Twelve times in three weeks they meet each other inside the Glassed Room and are locked in mental battles that may last two, three, four or more hours or however long they choose to communicate to each other through wooden chess pieces before shaking hands to signal truce or cede victory to the other. They sign peace treaties on pieces of papers, which show how their soldiers moved, and retire to plush hotels to fight another day. Sometimes when one of them loses, though neither has in the first six battles, one signs away a small piece of mental territory.

In this surreal world, the Glassed Room is lit and the spectators’ gallery dark. Black and white, it would seem. And, how appropriate for chess!

Silence is the constant companion for these players and the spectators on the other side of the Glassed Room. The players agonise over each move and the spectators get their thrills from seeing the pieces move up or down on the lit-up electronic board they can see from far and in darkness.

This dark and silent world of elite chess players is different from the world you and I know of. Even before they come to the stage, they spend hours and days, weeks and months, inside locked rooms with heavily guarded and encrypted high-capacity computers with multiple passwords. They have with them aides (called ‘seconds’) preparing various moves and lines for months at end.

It is also a secretive world. The ‘seconds’ that the outside world knows of are only the tip of the iceberg. Anand has Dane Peter Heine Nielsen, Uzbek Rustam Kasimdzhanov, Polish Radoslaw Wojtazjek and Indian Surya Shekhar Ganguly, while Gelfand has Ukrainian Pavel Eljanov and Alexander Huzman and Maxim Rodshtein, who like Gelfand were born in the former Soviet Union, but are now Israelis.

But even more interesting are the rumours of who the unofficial ‘seconds’ may be for either side. Anand, before and during his 2010 match against Veselin Topalov, was said to have been helped by Garry Kasparov, Vladimir Kramnik, Magnus Carlsen and Anish Giri, a 17-year-old prodigy born to a Nepalese father and Russian mother.

This time the rumour is that Carlsen, the World No 1, has again contributed to Anand’s preparation, while Gelfand is said to have been helped by Lev Aronian, one of the very few top players against whom Anand has a very modest record.

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Broadly, there are two kinds of people who are fascinated by chess and chess players. Ones who live to play and re-play each game they can lay their hands on and marvel at intricacies of how a player could have thought of moving ‘c4’ instead of ‘f4’ or something like that. To them a mere movement of a chess piece reflects art on a chessboard.

And the others—I am more this category—who are fascinated by the dark, secret and mysterious lives of chess players. The image of chess players in the former Soviet regimes, sitting in dark cafes, and plotting pawn and knight or rook moves and those then being interpreted as social movements is imprinted in my mind. Strategy, machinations, manipulations, trying to read the opponents’ mind and so on seem to be the world of big-time chess.

That chess Grandmasters have an IQ way beyond normal is a given. Yet, at the same time, as Jaan Ehlvest, an Estonian, who now lives and plays in the United States, wrote in his book, The Story of a Chess Player, chess players “are not geniuses at all”. He adds that some may in fact possess talent that only applies to chess.

His book has a very interesting chapter called ‘Secret Life of the Player’ and it starts with a quote from Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls: “I guess really good soldiers are really good at very little else.”

I guess the context was different but it could well apply to chess players. Like absent-minded scientists, eccentric artists and musicians, chess players live in their own world. It is a world different from yours and mine.

Almost 10 years ago, I remember standing near a frozen lake one late night in the Dutch town of Wijk Aan Zee, which hosts an annual Super Grandmasters tournament, once called ‘Corus Tournament’ but now called ‘Tata Steel’. It is a small town, and the lake is the central part of it. Chances are if you go out for a walk, you are bound to run into your friends and acquaintances among others who might be out for a similar stroll.  

I stood there for an hour or more and watched Garry Kasparov, Kramnik, Vassily Ivanchuk and many others go by. Not once did they acknowledge each other. Maybe that was the odd night, but it left a picture in my mind of chess players and their own little worlds.

Their lifestyles are ‘different’. When we went to a small Andhra Pradesh town called Sanghi Nagar, for the 1994 Candidates tournament, there were stories of Anatoly Karpov going for a late night swim and Gata Kamsky going for a tennis game very early in the morning, sometimes even before dawn. Garry Kasparov always took on the world and Bobby Fischer spent the last years of life, thinking the world was out to get him. And players of the yore drank as if there was no tomorrow and chain-smoked like chimneys.

Before someone asks, ‘What of Anand?’ we know little of the Anand off the board, or at least I know very little and only what he chooses us to know. He is very friendly and well-behaved (typically Indian, I suppose), great with children, incredibly well-read, loves or did love Terminator movies at one stage, listens to U2, remembers most of his games against top opponents (just as Tendulkar remembers all his centuries), has a great wife-cum-manager-cum-advisor-friend, Aruna, who shields him from every danger (media) and every eventuality. And he is a damn good chess player.

But a description of Anand I remember most is from Australian Grandmaster Ian Rogers, who long before he became a world champion, said: “As and when Vishy [Anand] becomes a world champion, he will be the first ‘normal’ world chess champion.”

No eccentricities, no tantrums, no controversies! Just Anand.

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At the time of writing, Anand and challenger Gelfand had played six games, Each of them had ended in a draw, inside 40 moves and each inside four hours, none of them going into the second time control.

In an era, where the average age of the top-10 of the world is under 30 and only four of the world’s top-40 are above 40 years of age, Anand is 42 and Gelfand 43 and the World No 1, Carlsen, is half their age at 21.

Anand and Gelfand have played against each other for more than two decades. They learnt and grew up in chess in a pre-computer era. Gelfand was always cautious, but Anand who played classical chess in the manner of rapid and blitz has slowed down with time. Caution is the new weapon added to his armoury over the last few years—maybe Matchplay and playing for World title has done that. Nothing wrong.

Yet, as Kasparov indicated on the sidelines of the World Championship, we could do with some creativity, new ideas and some aggression, which befits a World Championship match. But then for that Anand would need a bit of help from Gelfand, too.

(V Krishnaswamy, who covered Viswanathan Anand’s first World Chess Championships final in New York in 1995, is currently covering the World Chess Championships in Moscow. Follow his blog on the championship on forbesindia.com )