The effect of age on top chess players

Generation gap grows wider
Saturday, Nov 9, 2013, 12:33 IST | Place: Chennai | Agency: DNA
Valsala Menon

Anand (43) vs Carlsen (22) title clash is best example of how chess players peak at a younger age now.

The World Championship match between defending champion Viswanathan Anand and his challenger Magnus Carlsen is probably the best case study for the effect of age on top chess players. Anand is 43 years and Carlsen, 22, making the contest the first in modern chess where the age difference is more than 20 years.

The last time two players of such a generation gap met in a World Chess Championship was in 1978 when Anatoly Karpov, then 27, took on Viktor Korchnoi, 47. The outcome was in favour of the younger player but in the next match of such a diversity in age in 1998, which featured the same Karpov, 47 and Anand, 28, the older player triumphed.

It is not such an easy task to make inferences from the two case studies but the results were found to be dependent on factors such as motivation and talent. Anand’s results are by themselves good study materials in such a scenario.

Sixty years ago, most of the world’s leading GMs were around 40 years of age. Look at the latest rating list released by the world chess federation (FIDE) on November 1. Twelve of the top 20 players are 30 years or below. The 35-plus group is holding fort only because of Anand, Vladimir Kramnik, Veselin Topalov, Peter Svidler and Boris Gelfand.

History provides some pattern while dealing with the ages of eminent GMs reaching the peak of their careers. Former world champions Vassily Smyslov, Tigran Petrosian and Boris Spassky peaked when they were 36, 37 and 32, respectively.

The career graph of Anand is almost the same. The Indian hit the peak at 37 when he won the World Championship for the second time and also topped the rating list. In fact, Boris Gelfand of Israel, Anand’s World Championship opponent in 2012, is probably playing his best chess in the last 12 months at 44. Kramnik, who hit his early peak 13 years ago when he was 25 by toppling Garry Kasparov in a championship match outside the world body, is on a new high at 38 now, having gone down in the last 10 years.

History also provides rare cases of talents that blossomed in the 20s and stayed there till their 40s. Leaving aside GMs from the historic past, Karpov, Kasparov and Anand are the more recent examples of world champions who maintained their form into their 40s. Kasparov left the scene when he was still No. 1 at 40, though he topped the rating list for some more years without being active.

Anand is the odd one out among the trio because it took several years of international exposure for the Indian before he won his first title in 2000 at 31. But he had the motivation to continue fighting for top honours, though he had no fixed target in sight for a few years when he was at the peak.

There was the criticism that he had won his title beating weak opposition (Alexei Shirov) and there was no championship that the world accepted in toto. It was more like Karpov’s first title in 1974 when he triumphed by default, Bobby Fischer refusing to play the match. Karpov went on playing after 1974 with determination, winning tournament after tournament, exactly like Anand from 2000 to 2007.

The main assumption for the argument that top players peaked around age 35 was that they gained invaluable experience by then. In a game like chess, experience is an extremely important part of a player’s development.

Contrast this with the current scenario in world chess. There are six GMs in the age group 20-23 in the top 20. Carlsen, Fabiano Caruana, Anish Giri, Vachier Lagrave, Wang Hao and Sergey Karjakin have peaked in their teens.

Today, we have boy wonders becoming GMs at 12 or 13. Parimarjan Negi and Magnus Carlsen are such cases though the latter exploded after his first foray into the elite list. While it is one thing to say that chess is getting younger, the Anands and Gelfands continue to argue the case for the older generation with telling performances.

Source: http://www.dnaindia.com