The Chess Mind

...to be given after re-presenting the quotation:

Anand, by the way, did not have a strong tournament, and it is quite well known that he is not a very patient person. In his youth he played very quickly, living only on his enormous talent. He never became the great player he could have been, and I predict he will not be.

The author of this quotation turns out to be Jacob Aagaard, writing in Excelling in Chess. I still think the comment was and is more or less insane, but Jonathan B of the Streatham & Brixton Chess Club blog, from which the quotation and its solution were taken, seems more sympathetic. The reasons I find the quotation absurd are that Anand is in fact one of the most deeply prepared players on the planet (thus not just living off his enormous talent), probably the best defender alive (and how does one defend without patience?), and in the top three for well over a decade. If Anand were a bit tougher psychologically and a little less risk-averse, especially with the black pieces, it's possible that his results could have been even better, but there isn't any player without some relative weaknesses in his or her game.

The "Sunday puzzle" for the Streatham & Brixton Chess Club website is a quotation puzzle (!). Who said the following, 2001?

Anand, by the way, did not have a strong tournament, and it is quite well known that he is not a very patient person. In his youth he played very quickly, living only on his enormous talent. He never became the great player he could have been, and I predict he will not be.

Since by that point Anand had just become FIDE champion and had been near 2800 for some years, it's a remarkably brassy thing for a commentator to say or write. Anyway, I have no idea who said or wrote it, so you'll have to go to the S & B site to learn the answer. (But if you do know, please comment here!)

HT: Brian Karen

Victor Bologan, as seemingly everyone knew when looking at the earlier post. Here's the quotation, embedded in italics within the full paragraph from Bologan's Victor Bologan: Selected Games 1985-2004, p. 184:

My victory at Dortmund underscored the inequities of the tournament structure - there's no intermingling of the various rating groups. I can't recall a tournament in which, say, both Adams and Moiseenko played. Along the same lines, Kasimdzhanov's victory in Libya shows that there is not any great chasm in playing strength between the "elite" and us "mere mortals". There are many more than ten people who know how to play chess, and those ten would also find it more interesting to play against new opponents, rather than just incessantly playing each other.

The context of the quote was his surprise victory in Dortmund 2003, ahead of Anand, Kramnik, Radjabov and Leko. (Incidentally, another non-"elite" player, Naiditsch, won the event in 2005.) Note that Bologan isn't claiming that there's no gap between the super-tournament regulars and players like himself; what he denies is the presence of a "great chasm".

And this seems to be right. In events where the "mere mortals" are allowed in to take the scraps, they occasionally run off with the main course. Khalifman won the FIDE World Championship in 1999 and in two other events should have eliminated Anand from the competition. (And two other final four players from that event were also outsiders - Akopian and Nisipeanu.) Ponomariov wasn't really a favorite when he won in 2001 and Kasimdzhanov wasn't in 2005. In round-robins, Bologan and Naiditsch were surprises, too, and the examples can probably be multiplied with a little research. Maybe they can't (or at least don't) achieve those results as often as Anand and Kramnik, but they're strong enough to do it sometimes.

What should be done about it? More intermixing of the very top players with with the high-2600/low-2700 crowd is clearly what Bologan wants, and his rationale seems plausible. One possible difficulty is that there are so many of these second-tier players now that it's hard to give them all a chance to participate in super-tournaments. On the other hand, the number of elites is growing too, and the lack of sufficient country club events means that they have to go slumming from time to time. So maybe the problem is taking care of itself.

I believe the following applies, mutatis mutandis, all the way down the food chain:

Kasimdzhanov's victory in Libya shows that there is not any great chasm in playing strength between the "elite" and..."mere mortals". There are many more than ten people who know how to play chess, and those ten would also find it more interesting to play against new opponents, rather than just incessantly playing each other."

Who said it, what was the context, and what do you think of it? The answers to the first two questions will be given (or more likely confirmed) in a day or two.