It was an enthralling evening with five-time World champion V. Anand and IM V. Saravanan as the former touched on some of the finer aspects of the evolution of the game and his own journey through it to the summit.
The event — “Chess - evolution from mind to machine” — was organised by the Chennai International Centre at the Madras School of Economics.
Chess has been a pioneer in sports in terms of using technology or computers and Anand’s anecdotes shed light on the way it has transformed the game, positively and otherwise.
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“The greatest change computers have brought to the game has been to remove uncertainty from the game. If I know something to be good, I am 100% sure of it. We have gained certainty but also kind of lost that charm,” said Anand.
“Chess is always about uncertainty and so now players are trying to become unpredictable. They have different openings and many systems so that the opponent has to work for it.”
Recalling the first time he used a computer in the late 1980s he said, “we did not know what to do. I used a text editor and keyed in the moves. It took 20 minutes to key in one game so I stopped using it for six months.”
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Key difference
“Later I got two floppy disks one with the chess program and another with 2000 games. I could just search games of players like [Garry] Kasparov with specific instances like against a certain player or with white pieces. The search field made the key difference.
“When the chess engines came, I was progressing because the calculations I was lazy to do, I could leave it to the engine.”
Elaborating on how it has influenced him personally, Anand said, “I was always good with computers but five years ago, I was using it the wrong way and my play did suffer. In the long run though it has helped.”
The 47-year-old added that it was not the moves that made the difference, as a computer today will be outdated in three years time, but the confidence it gives a player.
“In the pre-computer days, you could remember 100-odd games, so you could still figure it out and had a 50-50 chance of getting a move right. But with the powerful computers we have, having analysed our next 10 moves, you have to know them or else you are done,” he said.
Has the audience in splits
The discussion started on a lively note with Anand recalling his early days. The champion kept the audience in splits, speaking about playing the Soviet players and wondering about the presence of KGB officials during events, and on how at one tournament he started against nine Soviet players but ended with a couple of Russian and Ukrainian players, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union during the event.
Anand starts 2017 with a tournament in Zurich in April.