Winning the Candidates felt like oxygen, says Viswanathan Anand

Winning the Candidates felt like oxygen, says Viswanathan Anand

After losing his World Championship title, Anand bowed out in the group stage of the London rapid and also his performance at Zurich in March was not upto the mark.

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Winning the Candidates felt like oxygen, says Viswanathan Anand

Five-time winner Viswanathan Anand feels he had become too “reliant” on computers last year and losing the World Championship was an extremely “testing” period for him but the Candidates win was like “oxygen” as it earned him the right to play a rematch against Magnus Carlsen.

Three losses over 10 games without a win and the world Championship title was in tatters last November but Anand soon scripted a historic turnaround when he registered three wins in 14 games without a defeat en route to his Candidates title victory.

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“It was a very, very testing period. Even 2013, there were good and bad moments but I felt the bad moments more intensely then the good ones, which is unfortunate because I can also look back on many positive things in my first six world championships. But what I kept remembering was how I was dropping the match,” he said.

“I think many errors had cropped up in my approach to play chess. I was becoming reliant on computers. I was not oblivious to it but I was not able to address the problem exactly right. I didn’t have time to fix anything,” Anand, who was here to highlight the role of chess in Business Analytics in an NIIT event, said.

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After losing his World Championship title, Anand bowed out in the group stage of the London rapid and also his performance at Zurich in March was not up to the mark.  Anand said: “May be my opponents didn’t focus on me properly or probably I was playing more freely. I had one of my best results in Candidates and I’m playing in World Championship in November.

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“The dominant emotion right now for me is the buzz that I have won the candidates. I needed a good result and it felt like oxygen. So I think I will take that with me, not only that I qualified, I had a good result.

“I got my confidence back and I am very optimistic now. I know even if I face the same mistakes, I will act now differently,” added Anand, who held the World title from 2007 to 2013.

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The 44-year-old Indian said he can’t elucidate the reason of his success at Candidates but stressed on the importance of recovering emotionally after the World Championship loss.

“There is no clear reason why I did well in Candidiates. I can’t pinpoint on anything. I think the most important thing was the period before the Candidates when I simply stopped following chess for a while. I decided that it was more important to recover emotionally, after all, a result like this knocks the stuffing out of you,” Anand said.

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“Sometimes you have one negative result after another and it is an unpleasant phase and I actually prefer not to look back at it at all. In December and January I was trying to avoid chess and somehow I felt lighter. There were some tournaments which were unavoidable but most of the time I tried to get away from chess. I also got the breaks at the right moment in Candidates.”

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Anand said he carried a lot of his World championship preparations to the Candidates tournament: “I was also lucky in a way that since my approach to the match backfired, I didn’t get to use lot of my preparations and they were still there which I could carry over to the Candidates,” he said.

“I had a short training camp in February. I thought it was enough and it was more important to spend time at home, play with my son and wait for the hunger to come back and when I went to Khanty (Mansiysk), the first game went brilliantly, it was my first win over (Levon) Aronian and it gave a big boost to me,” added Anand, a Padma Vibhushan awardee.

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Anand said he has a fair idea where he wants to work on before he takes on Carlsen later this year.

“I have a fair bit of idea what I want to change and what I think went wrong. So I have an idea what I want to do. So I will choose my team accordingly. But right now, I don’t want to give any details,” he said.

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“Secondly, I’m waiting for the bill. The billing procedure will finish by the end of this month. So after that we will have an idea of the venue. It is roughly scheduled for November but I just want it to be confirmed,” he added. Asked about his upcoming tournaments, Anand said he will play a lot of rapid events this year.

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“At the moment I am scheduled to play in Corsica in May. It is an exhibition event, then there is World Rapid and Blitz Championships (June 15-21) in Dubai and then I have an event in Geneva. I might put in another tournament but it depends on my training schedule. It is all very tentative,” he said.

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“It is nice to play rapid chess again. Last year, I didn’t get to play any rapid event, so it is good. This year, I will compensate for last year,” he added.

Asked if it would be a revenge match, Anand said: “Ya, well I will try to take the confidence to the World championship. It is inevitable that we will remember some aspects of that match but I will try to take it as a fresh match.

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“The previous results will obviously have some influence on my thoughts but it will be a different match. I will try to change the course and he is going to anticipate. I will think about what happened and try to give it a different twist this time,” he said.

Asked how he deals with criticism, Anand: “With experience, I have realised that not losing the mind when someone is praising you is a useful skill to have and once you have gone through some cycles of praise and criticism, you develop a thicker skin.

“After October, I was not simply interested and so I was not reading or following anything. Once you have played in a way that you are disappointed, you don’t need a second opinion. I’m not interested in feedback or what critics say.

“In Russia, a journalist made a bet on me that I’ll not qualify so when at the press conferences, he was asking questions and I was answering them sweetly, he was puzzled, he thought I was angry with him. But I had no idea,” he said.

PTI

Written by FP Archives

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