Balanced

Last night (local time) I was watching the latest installment of the World Chess Championships. The first two games had been fairly exciting, not so boring, and drawn. But Game 3 was different; Kramnik-Anand (WCC Bonn) Game 3 is a kind of instant classic. You can find the game and supporting stuff here. But that isn't the main point of this post.

What I really admire about Anand is the way he pulls all kinds of rabbits out of hats. At the end of some of his games, you feel that odd sense of The Other. He is a guy you could enjoy bumming around with. But he is also this guy who plays extremely skillful lightning chess and ends up in positions that just don't look right.

Yes, he loses once in a while. Yes, he has pretty bad patches too, as in his previous tournament) where he came in last. But somehow, he seems to balance the normal and the excessively brilliant in a way many chess grandmasters are simply incapable of doing.

Just think of the Bulgarian archfiend Veselin Topalov, with bulging-eyed intensity and an almost vibratory anticipation of things to come. Just think of the once-fiery (and still fairly so) Alexei Shirov, or that political maverick from Baku, Garry Kasparov. Or even that great one, the totally unbalanced Robert James Fischer. The last two are heroes of mine, chessboard-wise. But I think I'd be uneasy to be sitting in the same room as either of them (well, the late Fischer much more so than Kasparov, I must admit). Not so Anand.

King Fischer

Robert James Fischer (1943-2008) was the least expected of proxy cold warriors in an age of confrontation. When he became the first American world chess champion in 1972 by beating the Russian world champion Boris Spassky in Iceland's capital of Reykjavik, he began a whole new era of professionalism in chess and heralded an age of daring and innovative chessboard manoeuvres.

I remember learning to play chess in 1971 and being totally consumed by the frenzy of the Candidates matches and the clash of the titans in Iceland. I followed every rare news article with avid attention, and played through almost every game of the match with my grandfather. Fischer was the ultimate development of Capablanca and Nimzovich as far as his era was concerned. He brought life and convincingly dramatic struggle to the chessboard.

Bobby Fischer died of unknown causes some hours ago in the Reykjavik which brought him global acclaim. Rest in peace, old friend.