Ideas Of India 2025 | A Decent Junior To An Indian Representative In Just 3 Months: Viswanathan Anand's Magical Chess Journey
Vishwanathan Anand shared insights into his journey to becoming a chess legend. He reflected on how, in just three months, he transformed from a promising junior player to representing India.
Five-time world champion Vishwanathan Anand, one of the greatest chess players of all time, was born on December 11, 1969, in Mayiladuthurai, Tamil Nadu, to Sushila and Krishnamurthy Vishwanathan.
He learned chess from his mother but quickly began mastering the game’s complexities on his own. His daily visits to the Tal Chess Club in Madras (now Chennai) played a major role in his rapid development.
At just 14, Anand finished fourth in the 1984 National Championship, securing a spot on the Indian team. Three months later, he made an international breakthrough by finishing third in the World Sub-Junior Championship.
In an exclusive conversation with ABP Live at the Ideas of India 2025 summit, Vishwanathan Anand shared insights into his journey to becoming a chess legend. He reflected on how, in just three months, he transformed from a promising junior player to representing India.
"So I am the youngest in my family and one day...I was six years old. I walked into a room and my elder brother and sister were playing chess. So the first thing I did was to go and ask my mother to teach me. I was lucky that my mother was a good chess player. She came from a family where they all played chess, so lot of my uncles played chess in university and so on...and, she taught me how to play and then they waited for a couple of months and they must have noticed that i keep going back to the chess board, trying to apply what she had taught me and so on. Then they thought, "Maybe he is interested."
"Near my sister's college there was a chess club and she happened to see it one day when she was passing by and she came up with the idea of why not take Anand there and put him in this chess club. It turned out that it was India's strongest chess club - the Tal Chess Club in Chennai - and all India's international masters were regular visitors there. It was a small chess community but a very passionate one. Many people who are still active in the world of chess and so on...sometimes you need luck, even on the board but I needed it off as well.
"First thing, i had a family member who knew how to play chess - 30 to 40 years ago, that was 90% of the requirement for you to become a chess player because you couldn't just find a book somewhere, you needed to go to a specialised library to find a place maybe they had it so that you could find the rules. At present, you need just five seconds to see the rules of chess and maybe even test yourself.
"When I moved to the Philippines with my parents when I was a kid, they had a daily chess show on TV where they would show a game that was played somewhere around the globe. They would show it to the audience with explanations and would analyze it. It was a really high-level education. It's really hard to emphasize how supportive my mother was. When I got back from the Philippines to India I joined the same Chess club and continued. In 1983, I played a tournament in the chess club, then I went to the national team championship and I started winning everything. I still don't know why exactly, but suddenly my level jumped. I won the top board prize in Bombay and then I got a chance to go for the national level - I qualified, so within the space of three months, went from becoming a decent junior to being able to represent India everywhere," five-time World Champions Viswanathan Anand told ABP Live.
Anand's dominance on the world stage began in 2000 when he won his first world championship by defeating Alexei Shirov. He reclaimed the title in 2007 and successfully defended it against Vladimir Kramnik (2008), Veselin Topalov (2010), and Boris Gelfand (2012). Though Viswanathan Anand lost the world title to Magnus Carlsen in 2013, his legacy as a chess icon remains unparalleled.
Top Headlines
