Thursday
May202010
An Incredible Interview With Anand
Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 12:18AM Seriously, this is some AMAZING stuff. You can read part 1 here. We knew who Anand's full-time seconds were, but he was also helped by (among others) Magnus Carlsen, Garry Kasparov and Vladimir Kramnik. Wow. (Topalov sure knows how to make friends, doesn't he? To be fair, Anand is himself extremely well-liked, so it's not out of the question that he could have received some of that help anyway, but still.)
(HT: alegs1)
Reader Comments (15)
So being a nice guy does help..!
Sometimes nice guys do finish first! :) I wonder what it must be like being Topalov, reading something like that, and saying to oneself, "I wonder why Magnus and Garry never call...?" I imagine he's not surpised about the stony silence eminating from "Vlady"...
Keep saving up, Topa- just a few more 'cores' and you might be in with a shot against the 'rest of the world/ everybody who doesn't like you much' team.
Anyway, I'm off to search ebay for some cheap 'team Topalov' t-shirts- apparently he over-ordered...
This also sheds a different light on the Kramnik interview during the match (which I had translated) - I paraphrase rather than giving exact quotes:
"Game 9 gives me pleasant memories, I have beaten Kasparov with the same opening variation in the London WCh match" - this line of the Nimzo may actually have been Kramnik's own suggestion!?
"The Slav endgame is perfectly fine for a WCh match" - was Kramnik bluffing here?! It could not, and cannot be a complete surprise to team Topalov that Kramnik was helping Anand. And it was actually suggested - though maybe more in jest - by some people while the match was underway.
IM Stefan Loeffler, who did the interview, was probably blissfully unaware of what was secretly going on. It would have been hard for Frederic Friedel from Chessbase, who put Kramnik and Anand in touch with each other, to do such an interview without accidentally asking the wrong questions: "Did YOU suggest this line of the Nimzo? ..."
Anand might have been a bit disappointed that Spassky didn't call. Karpov presumably was busy with his campaigning, but come on Boris!
Hello all, part 2 is up: http://chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=6348
I speculated that it made sense that Carlsen and Kasparov might help Anand in a thread last December "Guess who will be seconding Anand" and Dennis ridiculed the idea.
Just sayin'
They helped him, but they didn't second him. Seconds are full-time employees who practically turn into slaves for the duration of the match, give up all their information on the relevant openings, do multiple week-long training sessions beforehand, etc. This goes way beyond what C, Ka and Kr did. Still, I am surprised by the level of help the big three contributed.
By the way, looking back at that earlier comment thread, the kindest way to characterize the claim that I "ridiculed the idea" is that it's a distortion; less kindly, it borders on an outright lie. I said it would be very surprising, but there was no sneering or ridicule. Here was my comment back then (from the post at http://www.thechessmind.net/blog/2009/12/23/guess-who-will-be-seconding-anand.html):
"Yes, we should be hugely surprised if it was [the case that Carlsen seconding Anand, as had been mistakenly rumored at the time when a journalist misheard "Nielsen" as "Carlsen], especially now that Kasparov has committed himself to Carlsen. As I wrote in the update, it was a false alarm, and that's exactly what we should expect at this point with Carlsen at #1 and working with GK."
About seconds, there is a long interview with Kasimdzhanov (in German) at the German Bundesliga homepage:
http://www.schachbundesliga.de/magazin/artikel.php?artikel=4073&type=2&menuid=83&topmenu=136
I just translated parts of it at
http://www.chessninja.com/dailydirt/2010/05/anand-was-first-in-seconds.htm#comment-221946
Briefly, he doesn't consider himself a slave of Anand ("Fact is, I never considered Vishy my boss. We work together as friends and colleagues."). But yes, during the last six or seven months he hardly played any own games - "But now [after the match] I can slowly start playing again"
Thomas, you're not bringing up the point about his not considering himself a slave because I called seconds "slaves", are you? My comment obviously wasn't meant literally, but was meant to indicate only that during an event the second basically does nothing but analyze, analyze, and analyze some more - even to the exclusion of sleep.
That aside, thanks much for the link and translation, and also for the helpful information about Astrakhan and the overall Grand Prix standings.
Dennis,
I don't see how you can reasonably say that what I said "borders on an outright lie". To be a an actual lie, not just bordering on one, it would need to be an untruth, I'd have to know the truth and I'd have to have the intent to deceive. Of course, nobody can be expected to really know what I intended, but you could reasonably accuse me of intending to deceive if I could show some evidence that I had knowledge that contradicted my statement. The matter at hand is highly subjective. If I felt ridiculed, then I wouldn't have been lying, I might be wrong because I don't understand ridicule, but I couldn't reasonably be accused of lying.
Further, do you think it's reasonable to assert that I intended to deceive?
I don't see that we're anywhere close to a lie her, which I would assume is what it would take to border on one.
I don't even think it was a distortion. I think there was a tone of condescension. You didn't say you would be "very surprised", you said "we would be hugely surprised", which I would assume would be an outsized or extreme level of surprise. Something that is held to be surprising to a high degree might be labeled as being outlandish or its synonym, ridiculous.
Finally, I think I was pretty much spot on with my speculation, which doesn't bear on whether I distorted or lied above, but I think I'll take this opportunity to quote this here for context:
"It's not hard to imagine that much of the professional chess world is on Anand's side here. I read where someone said that a Topolov [sic] win, on his home turf with the inevitable hints of Danailov pulling dirty tricks, would be a disaster for Chess.
If Kasparov is helping Anand out, through Carlsen as an intermediary or not, it would make sense. Maybe they're coy about declaring Carlsen as The Second, but would we be surprised if the legendary Kasparov database was put in service of Anand's team?"
Jordan,
I would have been more accurate if I had said that it's somewhere between a distortion and bordering on an outright lie, rather than suggesting that those were alternative ways of saying the same thing. I don't assert that your utter misstatement of what I wrote is a lie, but it is false. To disagree with something and to find it implausible, even very implausible, is not to ipso facto ridicule it. To tell someone who likes playing the lottery that their odds of winning are hugely improbable is not to ridicule them; it's to offer a probabilistic judgment. To ask if he likes paying a tax on stupidity would be a case of ridicule.
Did you intend to deceive? Probably not. But I do think you were trying to vigorously pat yourself on the back (and still seem to be - witness the last comment), and by exaggerating what I wrote it suggested that your hypothesis was all the more brilliant. (Sort of like a fish that got away story, in which the fish gets larger with each retelling.) And that's not the only distortion. My claim was that Carlsen acting as Anand's second, while he was working very closely with Kasparov, was extremely/very/hugely unlikely. So while I already admitted my surprise about the level of Carlsen's (and Kasparov's) involvement, there are at least two mitigating factors against a full-fledged "I told you so". First, Carlsen's no longer working as closely with Kasparov, so the situation is a little different. Second and more importantly, Carlsen did NOT second Anand, so with respect to what I actually wrote, I wasn't mistaken.
Dennis,
Ridicule was probably an exaggeration, possibly you could label it a distortion, but I think distortion implies a willful misrepresentation, which I can tell you wasn't there.
I never really suggested that Carlsen was working as a The Second to Anand. What I said that you found "hugely surprising" was this:
"but would we be surprised if the legendary Kasparov database was put in service of Anand's team?""
which I assume was what you were referring to when you said "we would be hugely surprised".
From the interview with Anand, it appears that this did happen.
Also, it appears that much of the professional chess world were sympathetic to Anand and several top players helped in the preparation.
I am patting myself on the back, true. My motives aren't to inform or improve the discussion.
Distortion doesn't require the intention to distort; if it did, we'd have to ascribe intellect to funhouse mirrors, pools of water for making sticks appear bent, etc.
As for the database, see once again the reason I gave as to why it would be surprising: the nature of the Carlsen-Kasparov relationship. And once again, it wasn't put in his service in anything remotely resembling what I addressed in the earlier post. Carlsen was a sparring partner, while Kasparov - not Carlsen - basically checked some of Anand's questions. (It's not even clear that either player actually "gave" him anything - if anyone did, it was Kramnik who offered some "heavy duty" ideas.) For the third or fourth time, it goes beyond what I thought would happen, but is at best tangentially relevant to what I was discussing in December.