Monday
Sep022013
Anand: I Put Myself in Magnus Carlsen's Head and Think
Monday, September 2, 2013 at 9:30AM
Wouldn't that amount to murder? And how would he get in there, anyway? And what would become of the world championship cycle in that case? Miserable materialist metaphors aside, here's a short semi-interview between Jaideep Unudurti, who regularly comments on this blog, and world champion Viswanathan Anand.
Reader Comments (3)
Anand must treat the entire database and all the work he has done before and during his collaboration with Peter Heine Nielsen and other former members of his team as only the starting point and start building afresh on that base. Even if Nielsen is going to be neutral during the Anand-Carlsen WCC match, what about the recent past when he was with Carlsen? If Nielsen was asked by Carlsen for inputs on some opening, say, the semi-Slav or Slav, would the former not have given his entire preparation to the latter? Is it really possible that Nielsen would have painstakingly avoided all the preparation that was with him belonging to the Team Anand era and prepared new lines in such short notice?
[DM: That would have come up in their (Anand's & Nielsen's) discussions, and there's no reason to think that Nielsen would have surrendered such information. Your first sentence is right though, for different reasons: theoretical prep explodes in general, and before world championship matches each team engages in its own little Manhattan Project. This is nothing new.]
In fact, in the eventuality of Carlsen having access to any of the Team Anand's preparation, that information could be a Trojan horse for the Carlsen camp. Because, Carlsen is forced spend a lot of time to go through those lines, whereas Anand would have had time to prepare antidotes for some of his own ‘killer novelties’. In the first place, Anand is, in any case, probably not very enamored by his own repository of preparations because the fizz must have gone out of that stuff already: he had already used them for three world championship defenses.
[DM: Carlsen wouldn't get that material, but I would agree in general with your last remark: a good chunk of prior prep ends up obsolete pretty quickly.]
Carlsen has not played Anand before in a match. Players alter their personalities in terms of preparation and style when they are preparing for or playing in a match, as opposed to playing an individual game. Therefore, it would be safe to surmise that the Carlsen whom Anand is going to face in a match is going to be different from the Carlsen we have known so far: Carlsen the superb tournament player, therefore, Anand not only has to prepare for a Carlsen who is known to the chess world, but also for a Carlsen who is, as of yet, an unknown entity. But, Carlsen is not going to alter his style of play radically for the November WCC Match.
[DM: Style of play doesn't get radically changed for a single event. On occasions, opening prep does, but not style. Style isn't like a suit of clothes you can try on one day and reject the next; it's a reflection of one's understanding of the game, tendencies and strengths developed over thousands and thousands of hours of work and play.]
So, what exactly does Anand mean by putting himself in Carlsen’s head and thinking? Carlsen has some idea of how Anand works and what he looks for while preparing for a match. “But this information works both ways," Anand says.
Anand said in an interview published on the 5th of September in the Deccan Chronicle that a lot of creative, out of the box ideas are being played these days mainly to avoid theory, but they are one game wonders: you find a great idea, play it once and within two days someone has found a way to refute the line. So, in that way, chess has become more esoteric in terms of what is played. Nevertheless, Anand believes that a good move on the chess board would only result from good preparation. Therefore, Anand is also not going to alter his style radically.
It would, therefore, be interesting to see how Anand would get Carlsen into prepared territory while Carlsen veers away from any preparation.
In 1986, Kasparov dismissed one of his seconds, GM Evgeny Vladimirov, alleging that he had caught Vladimirov copying his (Kasparov’s) personal notes (as described in Kasparov's autobiography 'Unlimited Challenge', chapter 'Stab in the Back').
These days, notes are replaced by computer databases. My question is: can we deduce from the above described incident, that, top players who have a team of seconds, like Anand, would have preparation of their own which the seconds would not have access to?
[DM: We can't "deduce" anything of the sort. (Blame the Sherlock Holmes stories for that misuse of "deduction".) I don't think we can induce anything of the sort, either, but I suspect that what you suggest is true in most cases. I don't think Kasparov had any secrets from Dokhoian, but for more occasional partnerships there wouldn't be any need for the second to know everything anyway, just what's relevant to the event in question. By the way, Vladimirov needn't have known everything either, assuming only for the sake of argument that he was guilty. All he needed to know was the bit of preparation relevant for the upcoming game.]