Viswanathan Anand

World Champion 2007 – 2013, winner of the 2007 tournament and three title matches (2008, 2010, 2012)

FIDE World Champion 2000 – 2002 (winner of the 2002 tournament)

Highest Elo rating: 2817

Ranking: Anand was the world number one intermittently between 2007 – 2011, for a total of 21 months

Tournament career: Winner of 30 super-tournaments:

World Championship 2007

FIDE World Championship 2000 (knock-out)

Candidates Tournament 2014

2x winner of Chess World Cup (2000, 2002)

5x winner of Tata Steel Masters

3x winner of Linares Chess Tournament, Dortmund Chess Meeting

2x winner of Amsterdam Chess Tournament

and many others…

Chess Olympiads: No personal successes, but he nurtured a strong generation of Indian chess players who, under his mentorship, won the Olympiad convincingly.

Why he deserves it:

Vishy Anand was India’s first grandmaster, and look where India is now – it has three players in the top 10, a world champion, and dozens of grandmasters. Anand was the one who paved the way for them. In the nineties, he burst onto the scene and, along with Kramnik and Ivanchuk, became the main competition to the seemingly unbeatable Kasparov at a time when Karpov began to age and decline in chess. Anand was the first of this young generation to attack the world title – in 1995, he won the Candidates Matches (defeating Romanishin, Adams, and Kamsky). However, he could not overcome Kasparov.

In the following years, he had successes in FIDE world championships (we are talking about the time of the chess schism). In 1998, Anand reached the finals but lost to Karpov. Two years later, he became the FIDE world champion by winning the knockout championship. He defeated Khalifman, Adams, and Shirov.

From 2000-2002, he was the FIDE world champion, but it was clear that he was not the true world champion that history would remember. When the unification match between Kramnik and Topalov took place in 2006, Anand sensed an opportunity to become the only recognized world champion in the near future. And he succeeded. In 2007, FIDE organized the world championship in an unconventional way – a tournament of eight players, with the stipulation that if the reigning world champion Kramnik did not win the tournament, he would have the right to a title match with the tournament winner. Anand won the tournament ahead of Kramnik, Gelfand, Leko, Svidler, Morozevich, Aronian, and Grischuk. Thus, he became the fifteenth classical world chess champion, but the following year he had to defend his title against Kramnik. Anand defeated Kramnik and managed to defend the title twice more – in 2010 against Topalov and in 2012 against Gelfand. He was only surpassed by the young Norwegian phenomenon Carlsen in two matches (2013, 2014), between which Anand shone with an unexpected triumph at the 2014 Candidates Tournament. Anand was last a world championship candidate in 2016, before passing the baton after more than twenty years.

Anand was the world number one for a total of nearly two years and was in the top 5 for most of the time roughly between 1990-2015. Besides the World Championship and Candidates Tournament, he won many other major events: two world cups, five titles from Wijk aan Zee, three titles from Linares and Dortmund, and many others.

Today, Anand is still formally an active player, although he doesn’t play much anymore. He is part of the FIDE leadership and is involved in the development of chess in India and occasionally in commentary.

Best games:

Levon Aronian vs Viswanathan Anand

Tata Steel Masters 2013