Vishy Anand

Five-time World Chess Champion and, by his own account in conversation with Tyler Cowen, India’s top-ranked player for 37 years running as of 2023 — widely regarded as one of the greatest chess players of all time.

Anand’s career runs from his first Candidates Tournament qualification in 1990 through a first-place finish at the 1991 Reggio Emilia super-tournament, world championship victories over Vladimir Kramnik and Veselin Topalov, and continued top-ten world ranking into his fifties, an unusual longevity he attributes to a deliberately redesigned practice routine rather than to natural exception. He describes himself as an intuitive player — someone who often finds the right move without being able to immediately explain why — in contrast to more systematically calculating rivals, and he has been candid that a five-time world champion still hates losing more, not less, as he has aged. [?] Exact birth date and further biographical detail are not established in this source.

Core positions

Anand argues that chess engines, and AlphaZero in particular, have dissolved the sport’s stock of general principles: moves once dismissed by inherited rules of thumb now have to be judged case by case, since ‘there are no general principles anymore.’ He holds that engine-verified preparation only has value once checked to full certainty — a 99 percent-verified line is ‘worthless’ — and that this certainty decays on its own as engines and hardware improve, forcing periodic re-verification of old analysis. He is sceptical that computer-resistant formats such as Fischer Random actually escape computer dominance, since engines prove ‘just as good’ at those variants too; format variety, in his view, survives for human-interest reasons rather than as an anti-computer strategy. On his own expertise, he identifies pattern extraction from remembered games and a visual sense that a position has ‘gone wrong’ as more central to his play than raw calculation — closer, he says, to how Magnus Carlsen describes his own intuitive style than to Fabiano Caruana’s more exhaustive approach. He is unable to fully explain competitive slumps (including his own, from roughly 2011 to 2013) beyond attributing them to rivals’ accumulated study closing a gap invisibly, and describes the only remedy he has found as abandoning the attempt to diagnose the problem and returning to unforced play.

In the wiki

Vishy Anand on Staying in the Game — Conversations with Tyler: how engines ended chess’s general principles, the mechanics of his own intuition and calculation, the shape of a competitive slump, and how he rebuilt his practice to stay in the world top ten past fifty

Vishy Anand

Core positions

In the wiki

See also