Viswanathan Anand: Listen to Yourself and Everything Else Will Follow

Am I paranoid? I think it is normal because you always have worries and when you are paranoid you start to sense the problems that could arise. Generally, the worse problems occur to me when I go [to tournaments] blissfully unaware of everything. When everything is going right then you should feel worried because it is perhaps a sign that you haven’t picked up on something.

I had the worst result of my career in the second half of 2001. My confidence was undermined so much that it took me months to get it back. And at this stage, I think I tried out almost everything. I tried switching openings, making a couple of things better, but nothing really seemed to work. Though it wasn’t disastrous, performance-wise I wasn't incredibly alarmed, but I knew that was not the way I played chess. I lost my world title in December 2001.

I think it’s important to analyse my games and figure out what is going on. It is important to take risks for success, but afterwards look at the games objectively. Did I win because I posed him problems he couldn’t solve? Or did I get away this time because of my reputation? And if there are some obvious mistakes that I made and my opponents blinked and let it pass out of respect, they will eventually go back home and figure out that I am bluffing. So then, could I do it again and again?

In 2000-2001, I had a long stretch of success but my games in early 2001 were incredibly unconvincing. I was lucky here; I made mistakes but my results held up. There were already some warning signs and in fact I told Aruna that I am not happy with the way I am playing because I am just making too many mistakes. But you can’t get the seriousness in because you still tell yourself: I must be doing something right. Again there were a slew of inaccuracies but my opponents let me get away with it then. In June, I played Kramnik in a rapid match and I think this is one of the worst matches I have played, but I still won. I think I should have remembered that I got away only because he was having difficulty in putting me away under severe time pressure. But in a classical game, there is no way he would be under that kind of time pressure. But it kind of drifted and the next thing you know, Boom!

It is only when the tide goes out that you see who is swimming naked. The one thing I learned is to be objective and make changes before they are absolutely necessary. If things are going your way for a long time then there are a lot of things that you have not spotted. So maybe you are competitively very strong but your opening work is not going very well. Success can mask a lot of things.

You make the changes not because you are afraid something might go wrong in the future but because you want to discover new things about chess. Between 2003 and 2005, I had the chance to enjoy chess without any pressure so there was no clock ticking; because the World Championship wasn’t around. And you know that you might have the odd bad result but there will be a next round and I will work hard, but I really enjoyed chess in those years. And that is probably the biggest thing. I think everything else flows from it. There is almost nothing of competitive use that you are going to hate doing.

Failure is often a good wake up call. It is like cold water in your face. The first thing is to see what you have done wrong. Again there is a difference between one failure and a string of failures. And the second thing is just to do the work on the chess board. And I try to work on the new stuff. Generally I play my best and I have the least difficulty in remembering my moves when I am doing something new and fascinating. If you are doing the same stuff over and over again, even if your competitor doesn’t pick [it] up, then it gets boring.

In 2007, [at the]Corus tournament, [I] lost two black games to Topalov and to Kramnik. I couldn’t even really understand why I lost. And this was slightly alarming. It was not as big a crisis as 2001, but [it was still] a mini crisis. And then for the rest of that year, I spent [my time] working more or less only on black. I understood that I had not been catching up to the latest methods. People were [bringing] in a lot of new and interesting ways and I didn’t know it. So before the next tournament, I didn’t try to do things in a hurry. Just this information was valuable. In 2001 some specific problems had started to appear but because my results were good I let it go. This time I didn’t. This really illustrates how those two years developed.

In 2007, I won the World Championship which I am retaining till date and in 2001 I lost the World Championship and kind of drifted away. That’s the parallel.

Every once in a while you have to outfox your opponent. I think the risks that you take and which are enjoyable are those where you are learning new things about the game and then you want to try it out. I find that those kind[s] of risks generally play off well.

There is other stuff where you learn to distinguish, for example, in the 12th game I think Topalov took a very unacceptable risk. It is because he missed some particular move but usually the bungle-up is because the match has been so tense for so long that you do something. That’s not risk taking but just nerves in a certain way. So you try very hard to avoid the second type. But equally, it is very difficult to draw a very clear line between the two. If he had won the match, he would be giving the same lecture on how his risk had paid off and was a controlled risk. So there is this sort of unprepared risk that you want to take [once] in a while but you have to be aware [of] what you are doing. You can’t fool yourself.

If you don’t have self belief, then you could have the best preparation in the world, but there will always come a moment when you hesitate, you make the second best move, you make a move where the risk is lower and you slowly lose space. It is important to prepare every single line up till the end. But you should also be ready at some point to start fighting. In the end, it is all about self-belief. No work is ever going to be near perfect, so you should always have some element of doubt. But then you must find a way to slowly disconnect yourself from those problems. That’s why I go for a nap with the idea that whatever I have done I will park it there, and go to sleep and then shower, eat something light and go to the game.

You don’t want to be surprised but not at the cost of your confidence. That is the balance that you look for. For instance, let’s take the last match in Sofia. I lost Game 1. It hit me hard of course, but everyone told me 'you were pretty calm that day'. And the thing is that if you have enough experience, then you know it is life and then you park it there. The worst thing is to get emotionally unstable and angry and too excited. The thing is to calm yourself down and go to the next game. So we played Game 2 and my experience has told me that once you play Game 2 and even if it is a draw you will still be calm the rest of the day, and then it will heal with the third game and so on.

I think when I started to get close to Game 6, 7 and 8, I was leading by points and it looked like I was dominating the match but my experience told me that it would actually start getting tougher for me. Because I could see that the opponents were putting pressure especially on my black openings, and somehow I was not getting the kind of positions I wanted to get. In fact, I lost the 8th game, and drew the 9th which I was winning. And so it was tough, but maybe I was able to contain the damage. If I had not been expecting it, then it could have been much worse. So it is almost like I had the premonition of which stage of the match [would] not [be] going very well.

Blind spots may never go away. They remain with you since childhood. You just get better at covering or masking them over time. But if you are put under enough pressure, you will make the same mistakes. The blunders I make, I can find a game from childhood and they will be exactly the same. [They are] the same kind of blind spots, [and] they never go away. If I work on a weak spot of mine, it just makes it a lot less weaker, it doesn’t completely go away and very rarely does it become my strong point. That’s because our nature doesn’t change very much and I think that’s what you look for when you are playing an opponent. For instance, I would say that when I play Topalov I generally work with the assumption that he is someone who tries to take a lot of risks. As long as I am willing to wait patiently, at some point he may push too far and I have to be ready to punish him. You put them under enough pressure, then they crack and these old blunders come up again.

You try to find out what he [the opponent] is really good at. Does he defend well, does he attack well, does he convert an advantage very efficiently with the least of errors, does he pose a lot of problems when he is worse? And if you keep playing over a lot many years then you will also get a psychological insight into them. Like you can see when they are calm or you know that nervous people make sudden mistakes. Calm people don’t like very specific problems, they like to deal with positions that you have to defend over a long time but they may not respond very well to specific problems. These kind of things give you some insight.

It is funny that you are sitting with this other guy and after a while you can hear him breathing. So when the breathing suddenly stops you know that he has made a mistake. And these [reactions] come to me subconsciously. And it is difficult to explain this. So you can feel when someone is edgy or uncomfortable. For instance in Game 5 with Kramnik in Bonn [World Championship Match in 2008], he made a move which surprised me a lot because that improved my position and then it suddenly hit me that the only reason he would have done that was to strengthen it for the next move. Something he could have done right away but he wanted to make it even stronger. But he lost. There was a specific tactical problem with it.

The first thing I looked for [in my team] was that everyone gets along. This is the biggest part because you are going to be together a lot. And principally with me! We share everything. We are very open so everything that we work on belongs to all of us. So all the team members know the status at any point and they are able to contribute. We don’t divide the team in this area or that, so there are no silos. We just try to find a working arrangement that’s comfortable for everyone. Nielsen and me, [we] like to listen to music while we work. But of course we have our tastes in songs so the first few times we had to ask the others, are you okay with this? Like Nielsen loves the Rolling Stones and I love the Pet Shop Boys but people have strong opinions on them. Kazimdzhanov told me that the first year he suffered a lot but now he loves it. It turned out that everyone liked Rolling Stones so if anyone protested too loudly then Rolling Stones came on.

And with my team sometimes I could play them in a league match or something but generally speaking we tend not to play in the same tournaments. So that makes sure that our paths don’t cross. We don’t compete that often actually. And that’s part of the problem — when you work with someone who could be a rival then it becomes trickier.

So, for instance, I worked with Magnus Carlsen, a Norwegian prodigy, or Vladimir Kramnik. I think you can work on enough, given that I think that any potential confrontation with them will be a while away, we still have new stuff to do. But it was limited. With Carlsen I worked for three days and both of us understood that we can’t work for much more without giving away our ideas and then it might become complicated. So we are not that open. He isn’t either and it is wrong for me to expect it.

It is normal that once you become a World Champion people tend to knock you a bit more. The best sportsmen generally have a thick skin. I think it is very important to just find a way of keeping it away before the game. When there isn’t a game then you can be a bit open to it.

For me success is principally about competitive success. I mean occasionally it can happen in the first few games where you blunder but still you shouldn’t have blundered. But, let’s say if somebody is consistently worse in position but he keeps on winning and winning, then you can’t just say he was lucky all the time. It is time to examine what’s going on. Maybe he is aiming for bad positions but over the board he is better than you. That’s a perfectly valid strategy. You have to find something, may be you are not able to punish him because you don’t have the tactical abilities, so it is time to work on your tactics.

There are people who say chess is an art, it is artistic and you must do this and that. But it is primarily a competition where you try to beat your opponent and if you do it with some dodgy moves, fine. But the point is to be objective when you win as well. If you win you must admit that you may not have been 100 percent right. There you say it worked this time, but will it work again now that my opponents know I am doing it? You need to find something new to up your game at every chance.