Viswanathan Anand Quotes

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

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

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”.

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 wins, five draws and only one loss –an annihilation. The Russians were stunned . I was pretty surprised myself.

To become a world chess champion.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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