Anand employed a radical, mysterious strategy - Steinitz Variation of the French Defence - undertaking to defend difficult positions against one of the best attacking players of our time. Into the fourth game, the contest was more or less decided, with Shirov needing a miracle to claw back into contention.įor all practical purposes, it was a dead rubber, yet it’s for the fourth game that the final is best remembered. With black, Anand managed to draw the first game before he won the next two with a combination of guts and superb calculations. The match, in certain sections of the Western media, was billed the clash of the lightning kids, though as it rolled out, both adversaries embraced calculated aggression than quick-kill. READ | From Kasparov to Carlsen: Five of the greatest chess matches ever played The latter, a Latvian based in Madrid and one of the most aggressive players in the game, had pride to salvage and a championship to win, as he was denied the opportunity to challenge Kasparov for the Classical World Championship, despite winning the Candidates’ match two years earlier. Thus, on December 20, he was sitting in the rectangular room of the Mamna Convention Hall in central Tehran in the backdrop of the Al-Borz mountain ranges, hugging the city like an overbearing mother, opposite the relentlessly attacking Alexei Shirov.

But in the end, it all worked out well,” he says. But the good thing was, by the time I came out of my fever just as the tournament was starting, I felt much better. “Looking back, I would say it was even nice, because when you have something like that, which forces you to rest, you don’t feel guilty about not working. In hindsight, though, it turned out to be a blessing, as he had no time to dwell on his past failings. I mean, we were just taking medicines and sleeping and resting,” he recounts. There was no other option but to be there. We rushed to a doctor who gave some medicines and we somehow managed to reach Tehran. “After the qualifying rounds (in Delhi), we (wife Aruna and he) decided to go for a nice meal in the city, but the next day both of us woke up sick. Then, upon reaching Tehran, he had little time to brood on the past. They may actually believe this story,” remarks Anand about his adversary’s penchant for verbal posturing. Because you feel every chess player will know his answers are nonsense, but people slightly further away may not realise it. “It didn’t surprise me, but it still hurt. It hurt Anand, though after adding four more world titles to his cabinet, he could shrug it off as the “narrow mindset” of small people.

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