Viswanathan Anand Quotes

23 Sourced Quotes

A [world title] match has that feeling much more strongly because it's the same guy doing it over and over and over … When you play a single person, it becomes narrower because you are so focused on each other. It is a lot more personal.

Viswanathan Anand
The fact is he outplayed me. He just proved to be stronger.

Viswanathan Anand
I started at the age of six. My elder brother and sister were dabbling a bit, and then I went to my mother and pestered her to teach me as well.

Viswanathan Anand
When you lose, you really feel a sense of self … You actually feel that you are being taken apart, rather than just your pieces.

Viswanathan Anand
I have what I think is an extremely Indian relationship with God.... In Moscow before the tie breaker of the World Championship in May 2012, I again entreated God: Just stay on my side of the board.

Viswanathan Anand
One of the things I bring to my play is my Indian identity – my ability to shrug off a loss as destiny and hope for better tomorrow. I am often described as a natural or intuitive player.

Viswanathan Anand
My dream is chess played in every school in India. The Soviets would include a chessboard along with the bride's trousseau to ensure that the children born of that marriage knew the rules of chess.

Viswanathan Anand
Age is part of it. For instance, I recognise that [Carlsen] is going to do certain things because he's 22 and there are certain things I can do because I'm 43.

Viswanathan Anand
When I first visited Moscow in the late 1980s, I was so intimidated. I thought I could be checkmated by every cabdriver.

Viswanathan Anand
Being the undisputed world champion is a relief. We instituted a unified chess title, I am the absolute world champion.

Viswanathan Anand
You would have to sit at the board and sweat and feel the fear of defeat or the nearness of victory to understand what goes through a player's head … If you think it's that easy, switch off the computer and try and figure out a few moves on your own.

Viswanathan Anand
I can relate to many of the emotions they describe... But personally I just like to get on with the job of playing chess. I understand that if I win, I'm probably crushing my opponent's ego but it's not like I do that with great satisfaction. So I don't really look for conflict around the game … It's true that someone like Kasparov has this sense of history, and I'm talking world history rather than chess history. He has a sense of himself being in it, which, for me, is very hard to understand or even relate to in any way.

Viswanathan Anand
Magnus has many good qualities... he is very versatile and he can play a lot of positions at a very high level. He's also very flexible. And he has this amazing talent for grinding on, as you say. So that combination I was unable to deal with.

Viswanathan Anand
I felt I had I worked hard enough and I felt confident I had done the right kind of work and the right amount of work. But when you talk of preparations, the measure of success is whether it works or not. In that area, I failed completely. I did not stay the course. When you hit the right spot, the sweet spot, it feels great and you feel the preparations have been ideal, but I never got there.

Viswanathan Anand
Since the 1990s technology has taken some of the sheen off the Russian trainers and their methods.

Viswanathan Anand
When I started out, Indians did not have much interest in chess…Now India seems to spawn new chess academies every day.

Viswanathan Anand
Anything unusual that you can produce has quadruple, quintuple the value, precisely because your opponent is likely to do the predictable stuff, which is on a computer.

Viswanathan Anand
What happens to you at the board begins to feel like it's happening to you in person.

Viswanathan Anand
But perhaps they were thrown off by my playing style, which was intuitive-and perhaps a little influenced by Vodka. I ran away with the match early. The result was overwhelmingly in my favour: four winds, five draws and only one loss –an annihilation. The Russians were stunned. I was pretty surprised myself.

Viswanathan Anand
... in 2000, when I defeated Alexei Shirov at the World Chess Championship in Teheran to become the first Indian ever to win the title.

Viswanathan Anand
As a young kid sprouting a wispy moustache, I was sometimes dismissed by the Russians as an upstart. I have been referred to even as a coffeehouse player

Viswanathan Anand
I learned to play fast without agonizing about strategy or overanalyzing individual moves

Viswanathan Anand
I wasn't expecting him to be a gracious, so fair enough. The winner can say anything when he wins... so I guess we will just have to swallow it for now.

Viswanathan Anand