The Chess Mind

Hi Alex,

I'm hardly a FIDE apologist, but can you give any evidence of this? The only other thing that comes to mind was the FIDE final against Karpov, but that was "rigged" for Karpov (not against Anand) before the event started, before anyone knew who the finalist would be. That doesn't seem more anti-Anand than the 2001 event was pro-Anand by being held in New Delhi.

Does high heaven really care if Anand is officially #1 on this list or has to wait until the next one? (I'd think it's more concerned with the salvation of souls, wars, poverty, and [going down a few steps] the failure of Notre Dame football teams to win a bowl game.) And who is FIDE trying to help by doing this? They haven't looked like Topalov's dupes when rejecting outright the Bulgarian's attempts to achieve a rematch with Kramnik and not finding an excuse to let him play in Mexico.

Anyway, the ChessBase site claims FIDE is (properly) going to update the list to reflect this event and Gibraltar, so Anand will, at long last, have the pleasure of seeing his name in the number one slot.

I'll grant that A.R. and V.A. have a lot in common. For instance, both have long surnames and 5-letter given names that start with "A". Also, both play chess, are male, and lived in the 20th century. And...okay, I'm done. To take one really obvious disanalogy, Rubinstein played in no world championship events, while Anand has played in five (NY vs. Kasparov, Groningen/Lausanne, New Delhi/Teheran, Moscow, San Luis), with a sixth coming up this year. It's true he missed out on the Libya event in 2004, but that was because he was hoping - along with several other players - to be part of a Prague(ish) Agreement solution.

As for the Karpov match, I don't see why they would have changed the schedule specially for Anand - anyone else would have been in the same situation, and the participants knew they would be in that boat if they made it that far.

So I still can't see any anti-Anand animus in all of this. He has had plenty of chances at the title, and on the two occasions when he suffered some FIDE-based misfortune, he wasn't singled out.

As for imagined scenarios, I'm sure I can imagine a good reply.

Your list is interesting, and I agree with it in the abstract. If part of being "best" includes clutch performances and fighting spirit, however, then Karpov (and Kramnik) must come ahead of Anand. His peak rating (2780) isn't far behind Anand's, and although he never got over the Kasparov hump, he battled off everyone else for over 20 years, often in dramatic fashion. It's not that Anand hasn't ever come through in the clutch against his peers, but it's comparatively rare.

I disagree with almost everything you've written, but my aim isn't to disparage Anand, who is a truly great player, but to say that Karpov's competitive achievements are more impressive. So I'll only make a few points.

(1) Anand's record in the FIDE K.O.s was very impressive, but only marginally more so than Adams's - and no one but Adams's mother is likely to call him the greatest player of all time. Further, it's not clear to me that Anand's overall performance in Candidates and World Championship events exceeds what we should expect from a player of his rating.

(2) Karpov didn't win the title in a match (true, but neither did Anand), but he won several extremely difficult world championship and candidates matches (vs. Korchnoi in 1974 and 1978, and vs. Anand and Yusupov in the early 90s, for instance), and fought desperately against Kasparov, keeping almost every match unclear to the last game. Anand, on the other hand, lost the 1991 match to Karpov (by a point, after failing to convert four winning or near-winning positions), lost to Kamsky in 1994 with a 2-game lead with two games to go, fell apart against Kasparov in 1995 when the latter finally won a game, and didn't seem to put out much effort in the second half of San Luis, at least not when it still could have made a difference. I don't doubt that Anand has some competitive fire, but it's dwarfed by that of the 3 Ks. (That's not necessarily a bad thing - if you had to pick a top player to be your children's godfather, which would you choose? If I had to choose for myself, I'd probably pick Anand.)

P.S. Karpov reached 2780 in 1996, in an era with Kasparov, Kramnik, Anand, Kamsky, Ivanchuk, Gelfand, Salov, Topalov and Shirov all at or near their peak.

Glad we're moving towards agreement here, but we're not there yet.

(1) I don't think winning a K.O. necessitates coming through in the clutch. Winning a big event doesn't mean you rose to the occasion if you're already the favorite and weren't challenged. Coming through in the clutch, as I've meant it to contrast Karpov with Anand, is rising to the occasion in the face of adversity. And on that score, it seems to me a no-contest victory for Karpov.

(2) Anand's margin over Adams isn't especially great, and Anand didn't win two finals but only one. He beat Adams in a semi-final after about the 7th tiebreak game - one which Adams could have won at one point! If Adams found that win, or the win over Kasimdzhanov in (I think) game 6 of their match, their records would be even or in Adams's favor. (Note too that Adams beat Kramnik in the good ol' LV event.) Is this really a non-marginal advantage to Anand?

(3) I put the third K in the group because of his last-game win over Leko and all the garbage he managed to come back from against Topalov (especially his wins in games 10 and 16). Up through the first part of his match with Kasparov, his record as a clutch performer was non-existent, to put it mildly. What changed him, I think, was his grim defense in some difficult positions at the end of that match, plus the confidence boost the overall victory must have provided him. Maybe he's not yet on a par, guts-wise, with his two "great predecessors", but it seems to me he's further along than Anand.

(4) Anand's rating hasn't always been over 2780 the past decade, though it has almost never been more than a few points below it, true enough. That said, Karpov's rating was, with very brief exceptions, over 2700 for more than 20 years. Don't forget ratings inflation, either. In any case, my claim, remember, wasn't that Anand-in-the-abstract was inferior to Karpov-in-the-abstract. I think the increase in knowledge every generation (which is more than just a knowledge of "book") means that a player rated N at T1 should score less than 50% against a player rated N at a later time T2. But I think part of Karpov's peak was recent enough, and his competitive superiority significant enough, to put him ahead of Anand (at least for now) on the all-time great list.

(4) Let's not crown Carlsen yet. He isn't the best player in the world at this point, he's not that far ahead of Karjakin, and unless everyone gives up on chess because of computers, there's no reason to think Carlsen won't have plenty of successors nipping at his heels very soon.

(5) Anand will be the 6th player to top the rating list: Fischer, Karpov, Kasparov, Kramnik (tied; first on tiebreaks), Topalov and now your man.

(6) As I mentioned already (based on the ChessBase and TWIC sites), FIDE has agreed to make the correction.