VISHWANATHAN ANAND

Viswanathan Anand, (born December 11, 1969, Madras [now Chennai], India), an Indian chess master who won the Fédération Internationale des Échecs (FIDE; international chess federation) world championship in 2000, 2007, 2008, 2010, and 2012.

Anand learned to play chess from his mother when he was 6 years old. By the time he was 14, Anand had won the Indian National Sub-Junior Championship with a perfect score of nine wins in nine games. At age 15 he became the youngest Indian to earn the international master title. The following year, he won the first of three consecutive national championships. At age 17 Anand became the first Asian to win a world chess title when he won the 1987 FIDE World Junior Championship, which is open to players who have not reached their 20th birthday by January 1 of the tournament year. Anand followed up that victory by earning the international grandmaster title in 1988. In 1991 Anand won his first major international chess tournament, finishing ahead of world champion Garry Kasparov and former world champion Anatoly Karpov. For the first time since the American Bobby Fischer abandoned the title in 1975, a non-Russian had emerged as a favorite to become world chess champion.

Throughout the 1990s Anand vied with Kasparov and Vladimir Kramnik for a position at the top of FIDE’s official chess rating list. Anand’s first attempt to win FIDE’s world chess championship ended in 1991 when he lost in the quarter-finals to Karpov in the FIDE Knockout World Chess Championship. Because of the unusual format of the event, involving a series of short matches with quick time controls, it was boycotted by many of the top players. The decision to use a knockout format sprang from FIDE’s difficulty in securing a prize fund to pay for the usual long sequence of championship matches following Kasparov’s defection from FIDE to form a new organization, the Professional Chess Association (PCA; 1993–96). Anand got his first title shot in 1995, when he was ranked number two behind Kasparov, but he lost the PCA championship match to Kasparov with a score of 1 win, 13 draws, and 4 losses. Anand’s next title shot came in 1998 against Karpov, who had reclaimed the FIDE title following Kasparov’s formation of the PCA. At the time of their match, Anand was ranked third, behind Kasparov and Kramnik but ahead of sixth-ranked Karpov. Anand first had to battle his way through the strongest sequence of knockout matches in chess history in order to play Karpov, who was directly seeded into the final match. The players drew their regular six-game match with two wins apiece and two draws, but Karpov won the two “quick chess” tie-break games to win the match.