Viswanathan Anand’s chess prowess is the stuff of legend. The man nicknamed the Lightning Kid and the Tiger of Madras won five world championship titles over the course of his long career (which, for the record, is still not over as Anand occasionally plays in tournaments like the Global Chess League.) Recently, Dutch grandmaster Anish Giri opened up on how he was invited to a training camp by Anand and ended up being humbled.
The anecdote is from 2010, when Anand was the world champion and preparing to defend his title against Veselin Topalov.
The Invitation: When a young Giri met the world champion
Giri was 16 at that stage, and had already established himself as one of the most promising youngsters on the circuit. This earned him an invite from Anand’s team to attend a training camp. While Giri thought he had gone to the camp with plenty of prep in certain lines, he was soon humbled.
“In 2010 I got an opportunity to work with Vishy Anand. He was preparing for one of his matches. He was world champion at that period and the experience was definitely much more useful for me than for Vishy Anand, I guess,” Giri told Chess.com in an interview recently. “I thought when I came in there I had good prep in some variations. So I was showing my lines and then he was refuting them with such ease. He actually refuted all my ideas in the very first evening.
“In hindsight, I think he must have been very disappointed. He must have thought, ‘What is he saying? What is that? What kind of trash is that?’ I thought these were great ideas. Then I realized I was levels behind him. I think it is very important to see the very top and then you know what level you have to work towards. That really made a difference for me, for sure,” Giri added.
I thought I had good prep in some variations. So I was showing my lines and then Anand was refuting them with such ease. He actually refuted all my ideas in the very first evening.
The Magnus Carlsen anecdote: A similar reality check
Giri is not the only young player Anand has invited to bounce ideas in his world championship training camp. A certain Magnus Carlsen, who went on to usurp Anand’s world championship crown in 2013, was also invited by Anand to a training camp a few years before Giri, and had a similar experience.
When he was preparing for his assault on the world championship title in 2008 against Vladimir Kramnik, Anand had invited a young Carlsen to his home in Madrid to play training games with him.
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“I’ve been very fortunate about being able to study with Garry Kasparov and (Viswanathan) Anand, who was a world champion before me. It’s only then when you study, like you talk to them, that you understand how good they really are and how much they understand. For instance, with Anand, I had a training session in 2008, where we had both played a tournament where I’d done decently while he had sort of, towards the end, he had nailed it in. But he was preparing for the classical world championship,” Carlsen had recently said on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast.
“I went to Madrid for a couple of days to his house. As soon as that training camp started, it’s like something just switched on with him and he was, he was just so focused. We played a bunch of training games and from being this guy who seemed completely disinterested in this other tournament, all of a sudden, like he was crushing me. He had a massive plus score in our games and it felt like everything we analyzed, he just had a much deeper understanding of the game, seeing that he was fast tactically and everything. And it made me appreciate how good he actually was,” Carlsen had added.
Why training with Anand was a game-changer
Carlsen had even said that Anand beating him soundly in training games made him think that he was “delusional” about his own abilities. It was like being handed a reality check.
“It was just a reality check for me because I thought at that point that I was ranked third in the world. I was very briefly ranked number one already at that point, for like a week. I thought before that training camp I was maybe one of the best two, three players in the world. It made me realize that I wasn’t, and that maybe I was able to have better results than my actual level because of youth energy and optimism. That made me realize that I have a lot to learn and that I should be patient and not expect everything to come that fast.
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“At that point, I had a year of more or less constant rise. I was just winning tournaments. Every time I would lose a game, I would just believe that I could strike back immediately. I realized now that I was just delusional. I thought that was a lot better than what I was. That was probably why I was having such good results because you’re so confident. But having a little bit of a reality check, I think, helped me later to actually understand the game a bit better.”
