Played at the highest level for a quarter of a century

A LAST HURRAH?
– Middle-aged and magnificent
Mukul Kesavan

He is on the wrong side of 40 now, well past his sporting prime. He has played at the highest level for a quarter of a century but his competitive form has slipped over the last two or three years. He was once the best in the world; today even the uninformed fan can name half a dozen players who rank higher. The tawdry, politically-riven governing body of his sport has done him the service of organizing a home series for what is likely to be his last great contest. His contemporaries, mostly retired now, are respectful (as who wouldn’t be, given his extraordinary achievements and the length of his reign at the top) but they are increasingly willing to say that his time is up, that in this new era younger men ought to carry the torch. He disagrees; in his quiet, still-boyish way, he has taken guard not just against upstart youth, but Father Time himself, to see if he can see him off once more or go down, metaphorically, with his pads on.

We are speaking of the greatest competitor India has ever produced, Viswanathan Anand. FIDE might have done Anand the favour of locating the match in Madras, but playing at home is the only edge that Anand has been given. Unlike heavyweight boxing match-ups where the champion’s handlers try to handpick glass-jawed brutes to give their man an easy ride, Anand is going toe-to-toe against the highest rated player in the history of modern chess, the Norwegian, Magnus Carlsen.

At the time of writing, Anand is four games into his world championship match. All four games have been drawn and it’s fair to say that the honours are even. Two quick draws were followed by two prolonged ones. Interestingly, the player playing Black made the running in all four games. The fourth game (in which Anand played with the white pieces) was a dogfight, with Carlsen finding an early advantage and Anand hanging on by his fingernails. The match will initially be played over 12 games of classical chess, after which, should there not be a decisive result, a sudden-death tie-breaker will be used.

Match play of this kind is something of an anachronism in competitive sport. This format, where the reigning champion is automatically seeded into the final round while his challenger is made to play his way through a gruelling candidates tournament, is peculiar to chess. It bears some resemblance to professional boxing’s title fights where the champion meets the challenger with his crown at stake but there are two obvious differences: a) the title is decided on the basis of a single fight, not a series of contests and b) there is no such thing as a boxing tournament in the professional game. Amateur boxers box in tournaments in the Olympics, for example, moving from stage to stage till there are two men left to contest the final, but the professional game is made up of one-off prize fights.

Chess writers and players (including the challenger, Magnus Carlsen) have criticized the champion’s exemption from the candidates tournament. Carlsen, for example, has observed that Anand was world champion because he had successfully defended his title multiple times in championship matches whereas he, Carlsen, was the top ranked player in the world with the highest Elo rating because he kept winning the most difficult and competitive multi-player tournaments. It was, he said pointedly, a contest between two different concepts of chess-playing excellence, implying that if he won the match against Anand it would resolve an anomalous situation where the world’s top-ranked player had to fight for the privilege of playing a world champion who only ranked eighth in the Elo ratings.

The closest historical equivalent to chess’s world championship matches was the way the lawn tennis championship in Wimbledon used to be structured till 1922. The previous year’s champion used to get a bye into the final round where he waited for the tournament to be played out. The last man standing would then play the champion in what used to be called the challenge round. You can see why Carlsen thinks the present rules are unfair: imagine playing at Roland Garros under these rules. Even without a bye into the final, Rafael Nadal has won every time he has played the tournament except the one time when his knees were shot. If matters were decided by a challenge round, he’d probably win the title 25 years on the trot.

But unfair or not, there is a special excitement about a head- to-head contest settling the business of who is best. The idea that two great competitors should go mano a mano, over and over again to settle which one of them is the alpha male, has a real, if primitive, appeal. You can see this feeling playing itself out in games other than chess. At home, my wife and I are Federer fanatics; our children adore Nadal. When I point out to my son that Federer is still substantially ahead of Nadal in terms of Grand Slams won and therefore has the better claim to being the best player of his time, if not of all time, he snorts. How, he asks, with awful sarcasm, can the Great Federer be the best ever when he has such a dreadful record against his greatest contemporary, Nadal? It is, sadly, true that in their 32 meetings over nearly a decade, Federer has lost 22 times. Their head-to-head record is so hideously skewed in Nadal’s favour that I am always momentarily silenced by this rhetorical manoeuvre.

I am, naturally, rooting for Anand. Partly because he’s the underdog, partly because he is middle-aged and partly because he is so clever, composed and wry. During the first or second game, Garry Kasparov made an unexpected appearance at the championship venue. There’s history between Anand and Kasparov; not only did Kasparov beat him when Anand challenged for the championship for the first time in 1995, he behaved obnoxiously right through the match. Subsequently, Kasparov has gone on record to say that he thinks Anand is scared of Carlsen, who Kasparov claims as a protégé.

So a Norwegian journalist tried to fish in troubled waters by pressing Anand on what he thought about Kasparov being “in the building”. Without missing a beat, Anand asked, deadpan, “Like Elvis?” What a guy! Forget Elo ratings, now that is genius. That’s how he wins Blitz games: he shoots from the hip. He’s the Man from Madras, he’s QuickGun Murugan.

More seriously, he is a great champion fighting age to join the ranks of chess’s immortals. As Kasparov himself said, Anand’s “…entire career will gain an extraordinary new dimension should he defeat the Norwegian wunderkind against the odds”. And even if he doesn’t win, even if Carlsen routs him, it will be an honourable, even heroic, defeat, one incurred while looking Nemesis in the eye.

I sit for hours, watching the live telecast of the match on DD Sports. All I know of chess is the moves so the nuances escape me but I’m riveted by the gladiatorial intensity of this match-up in Madras. Meanwhile, hundreds of miles away on the western coast, also in an old presidency town, another contest is unfolding. This is an epic that could have been scripted by Disney: here, over several days, Snow White will meet Eleven Dwarfs.

Source: http://www.telegraphindia.com