MATCH ME IF YOU CAN
By Neeru Bhatia/Chennai
Story Dated: Wednesday, November 13, 2013 16:3 hrs IST
Twenty minutes before the game, the team would come up with holes in preparations, and ways to plug them. He has to quickly soak in a lot of instructions.
Then, he would return to the room. His brain cells would be loaded with information. He would close his eyes for five minutes. In that silence one can hear him breathing.
Then he would say, “Let’s go for the game.”
Those 20 minutes are tense. The stomach churns. But you can never make that out from his face.
Aruna describes her husband Viswanathan Anand’s run-up to a World Championship game.
Anand left his home in Mylapore, Chennai, at the age of 22. Over the past two decades, he travelled across continents to conquer the world. Not once, but five times over.
Now, he is back. To defend his title for the first time at home, in Chennai.
On November 9, the 44-year-old will face his challenger¯a Norwegian prodigy half his age. World no. 1 Magnus Carlsen, they say, is the best thing to happen to chess since Bobby Fischer.
Fischer was an American maverick, who ended Soviet domination of chess. His 1972 World Championship clash with Boris Spassky is legend. It is a different matter that he later went into a 20-year hibernation, and turned into a hardcore anti-Semite. He spewed vitriol against his home country and called it the “Jewnited States of America”.
After the hiatus, in 1992, he won an ‘unofficial’ rematch with Spassky in Yugoslavia. The US government had warned him not to play because of sanctions on Yugoslavia. Live on TV, he said “this is my reply” and spat on the American communique.
Carlsen is, in no way, eccentric like Fischer. But the streaks of genius are similar.
Fischer arrived on the chessboard at age 13. His battle against American champion Donald Byrne was termed the “Game of the Century”.
Carlsen, too, arrived with a bang at 13, when he became a Grandmaster in 2004. The same year, he drew a game with the Russian legend Garry Kasparov. The video clipping of the restless boy sauntering towards nearby game tables, even as Kasparov contemplated his next move, is a top hit on YouTube.
Carlsen is known as the Mozart of chess. Some also call him the “Justin Bieber of chess”.
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“Most other hotels had many banquet halls; we needed just three. In other hotels, the remaining halls would have had parties or other events being held. We did not want that noise. That was one of the reasons for zeroing in on this hotel,” says All India Chess Federation CEO Bharat Singh Chauhan.
The main venue includes the ballroom, where the match will be held, a media room, where players will meet reporters after each game, and the FIDE room for the chief arbiter and other officials.
The Regency ballroom will be the cynosure of all eyes. A sound-proof, one-way see-through, glass wall will separate the players from the 350 FIDE officials, coaches, former champions, experts and viewers inside the hall. To avoid distraction, the players will not be able to see anything outside.
The broadcasters will provide ten-camera, high-definition coverage. And live analysis will be rolled out by renowned commentators Susan Polgar and Lawrence Trent.
Full article here.
Piece of cake.