The great Anand’s little ideas – part I

Grandmaster Radosław Wojtaszek, one of Viswanathan Anand’s seconds in Sofia, annotated the games from the recent World Championship Match for the Polish “Mat” chess magazine. Wojtaszek’s annotations appeared alongside the long interview with the Polish chess player which I recently translated. As with the interview, the most interesting part of the annotations is seeing how the Anand team approached and viewed the match, and of course where their home preparation ended. I’ve translated most of the text (the title is also from the Polish magazine), but left out some inessential annotations as well as the first part of the general introduction to the match. The last section of Wojtaszek’s introduction is, however, a good place to start:

It’s worth emphasising the fact that before and during the match we were assisted in our preparation by such wonderful chess players as Magnus Carlsen, Garry Kasparov and Vladimir Kramnik. That was a great help and demonstrates above all the great respect that Vishy enjoys in the chess world. Also encouraging is the fact that preparation based on human ideas turned out to be better than preparation based on the use of the BlueGene supercomputer. That enormously powerful computer, located in Bulgaria, was made available to the Topalov team by IBM.

After months of preparation the day of the first game finally arrived. Of course the start of a match is always nervous. People are always asking themselves questions about the form of the players, or the openings they’ve prepared. For the members of our team the games, after many sleepless nights, were above all a time to sleep and rest. It’s interesting, though, that in Bonn I managed to fall asleep during most of the games, while this time round the nerves and stress got the better of me. My own case can serve as an example of how difficult and important the match was for our team.