No set and board at home for the champ

Chess champ Viswanathan Anand doesn’t have a board at home
5 Jan, 2013, 04.23AM IST, ET Bureau  
By Jaideep Undurti 

“You’ll bring the board?” asks Mrs Aruna Anandover the phone, “for we don’t have one at home”. Viswanathan Anand, the world champion doesn’t have a chess set in his home. I am not surprised at all.

Over the last decade, computers have completely taken over preparation with billions of positions stored in giant databases. Long before you can set up the pieces, you can click through and search for games going all the way back to 10th century Baghdad.

I had emailed Anand, saying it would make an interesting story to play against him and then get his impressions, to look at what makes him tick as a chess player. He agreed, and now his wife is on the phone to discuss the conditions of play, just as she has with the likes of Kramnik and Topalov.

We agree that I should bring the board and pieces while Anand supplies the chess clock. A chess clock is basically two stopwatches linked to each other. When a player makes a move and presses a switch, he simultaneously stops his clock and starts the opponent’s. Old-fashioned analogues have given way to digital timers but both kinds invariably excite airport security.

In movies, you often see the villain and hero playing each other using elaborately carved pieces. For actual play, such sets are rather impractical.

Chess players are a conservative lot, and top-level events use a set called the ‘Staunton’ which first came into play in a tournament held in London — way back in 1851.

FIDE, the world chess body has clear rules and exact ratios for official sets. The pawn is the basic unit of measurement, for example, “The size of a square should be twice the diameter of a pawn’s base” or the king’s height is twice that of the pawn. Not that Anand or his peers on Olympus need boards.

To them, the gross physical artefacts of wood and plastic are merely shadows of a struggle taking place in abstract dimensions, in an etheric plane where forces, energies, entities collide.

To invert a quote, to them, matter is just a disease of the mind. The modalities have been worked out and we finally meet. The venue is a 29th floor penthouse overlooking the sea.

A spectacular view of Chennai unfolds beneath our feet. We begin with the toss to see who gets white, and the advantage of the first move. I take a white pawn and a black pawn in my fists and after shuffling them a bit ask Anand to choose. He gets black.

An imperceptible nod, and he starts the clock. I take a deep breath. And push the King pawn. The world champion responds instantly with his specialty, the hyper-complex Sicilian Defence. Game on…