hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with Tyler today I'm honored to be in chenai with vishi Anand five-time World chess champion and one of the greatest chess players of all time fishi welcome thank you Tyler let's go back in time 1991 you're playing in Regio Amelia arguably the strongest Tournament of all time when it happened carpov is there Kasparov even paavi shows up right and you win what was the change in you that enabled
you to be in a position to win that tournament I I think it's just the work I'd been doing had kind of accumulated and had hit a certain level so to give you some background I qualified for the candidates for the first time in the
interzonal in Manila in 1990 about um July 1990 and Ria was a year and a half later so for the first time I I started to work seriously on my openings I got together some trainers um this training will look very funny to modernize but back then it was
considered uh let's say what is it they would do to you well we would actually sit in the board and move the pieces ourselves and um for the first time they systematically went down a list and said uh if you're going to play this opening all these things have to be checked and I had not thought like that before my thing was I'll check the top two things and I'll figure out the rest which was not as silly as it sounds today because back in the day
that's how you play chess the computers uh couldn't play Chess at all at that stage so um for the first time I thought in an organized way I started to work and you know there are people opposite you who contradict you who strong enough to
contradict you and tell you no actually I think you're wrong here you should think of this move or this is better that is better or I once did this and what have you so um you start to work like that on a systematic basis I played
my first candidat match in January in Chennai against D and suddenly I was paired against kov for the quarterfinals that was going to be in Brussels in July so roughly a year since I qualified again I worked with um gurovich um who
had been on caso's Team and so on I started working with him a lot I played Linares i' played Munich so I suddenly started to play very strong tournaments and face his opposition regularly um gurich taught me lots of things uh first
of all a lot of personal insights about kov you know he always used to say when Kao was fidgeting with his lips like this that means he's not quite he's calculating but he's not quite sure what's happening and um he's nervous and
then you look for it and you actually see the man fidgeting with his lips and then you realize that his moves are shaky you know it kind of opens your eyes to the Practical element um we went on um we worked very hard again I think
the level with him was one not much higher than what I'd worked to with um Vil and hellers um so I worked with gorovich in a very one funny story the first day I asked gurovich if I could watch there was a Star Trek going on in the
background would you mind if I watch that while we work and he said no uh he said if you want to watch Star Trek I'll go to my house you call me when it's over I'll come back but we were not doing two things this classic Star Trek
yes we talking 91 so and I said Okay okay then forget it I I'll switch it off and I was kind of annoyed I didn't see why I couldn't have that running in the background uh which just shows the gulf in professionalism if you like but uh it was like that his thing was very very systematic um during the match with kov we would adjourn games that again was still happening then we'd adjourn games which means that uh you seal your 40th
or your 60th move you continue another day and gorovich would sit in analyze for me at uh we would discuss the position briefly then he tell me no you go to sleep I'm going to spend the whole night working um so he would work till 3:00 or 4: in the morning checking everything alone and the next morning when I woke up he would brief me on everything so and then you suddenly realize oh my God how many things he found while he was working on this
position mine was very scatterbrain because I was a intuitive player uh I often couldn't explain what it is I was going to do I would find the correct move very often but if you pin me as to why I didn't really know it was just the
way I played CH so this kind of thing um I played a couple of tournaments between uh Brussels and uh re jilia specifically I played in tilberg I beat caspro I beat kov I beat kamsky I beat kacho uh I beat shot but I also lost to gpro I lost to
csky I lost to kov and some of these losses were just ridiculous is you were playing too intuitively because I I was volatile I would some position I would get excited think that things are going very well i' start playing fast miss a few things then come back I I stepped over the mark this that all the things what I think made the difference was I was suddenly facing people who didn't resign the game very quickly who didn't collapse especially
kov even in the worst positions he would continue resisting and that's an art you learn and then you realize this point this point is not going to come easily I've got to um push again and push harder and push harder and and it's one
thing training for this but it's not real the second thing is actually facing it over the board and then it becomes real in a way so and all these things combined and then in ra Amelia I won my first game with salof I suddenly thought I actually
played that game quite well I don't know what happened but I played that game quite well then I beat Casper in the second round again it seemed pretty easy and I already beaten him twice within two months um then I lost to um gurovich my trainer
your trainer yes my trainer and he seemed to know he lured me into a totally harmless position and then waited for me to get impatient and I mean literally someone who has good psychological insight into you that was
annoying then I got incredibly lucky against against pvi and then a couple of draws against gelfand and evanchuk amongst others and in the last round I beat bski still in a natural way I mean it's not like i' had gone that that far from my roots but it
happened and uh um Casper Drew with halifman kov Drew with gend and I realized I'm I'm on first place so that was a very very nice surprise uh I remember faxing a friend uh just I won I won I won I wrote it three times and
faxed it to him um I don't know if everyone in audience will know what a fax machine is but anyway some of us remember yeah so I did that and I was very excited and so on and uh um uh I felt stronger I realized that um the same people who cost me a lot of problems earlier in the year I was at least able to deal with them it's a it's a work in progress because they also constantly work at self-improvement and so on but at least um I felt I could
confront them on equal terms if you were playing ivanchuk back then when he was at his Peak younger how would you approach that psychologically because he's a very dangerous opponent right if he's in the right mood he can whip mag
at 5 Minute CH he is uh very dangerous uh but there are some patterns I found that um actually we met in the world Cadet so the under 16 championships in 1984 and then we kind of kept bumping into each other and actually my initial
score with him was quite positive I think I've never had a negative score against him but quite often in painful moments um moments when I wasn't expecting any danger from him that's when he would beat me so there's a clear
pattern when you I wouldn't call it underestimation but you kind of feel you're wallowing in your strength and you think it'll probably work out fine I'm there's no need to worry about all these things and then that's when it he
would beat you and when you're fully concentrated well his score is not so good so the um solution kind of suggested itself but he was a tricky opponent all my life the thing is because I started out with an early plus
score against him and and he saw it as a stiff rivalry initially I just thought well he's Soviet so he must be better than me so I didn't feel any rivalry then even when I got better than him um I didn't switch into this that he's my
rival I kept thinking well we're all rivals but we're all facing uh you know how to get to the world championship so um but he's felt his rivalry much more and then the next year uh Lu rento the organizer of Laris he organized a
friendly match between ivanchuk and me and I beat him there slightly undeserved I mean in sense I didn't get good positions but I won them anyway but you know that's chess and um I think it bugged him a lot and so for many years
um he would um uh ignore the rest of the tournament he almost couldn't concentrate against the others then when when he came against me you know he you knew he'd been waiting the whole week for this one game and it was kind of
annoying to have such a mark on your back uh there one guy who is just looking for thinking of you all the time while you're thinking of all your opponents in a very organized fashion um anyway many many years later in uh Tata Steel in 2003 I in vik
I realized that he wasn't even concerned about me anymore now the new mark for him was pamario who had just beaten so I felt relieved okay you can have chuki uh but it's it ivanchuk's level can vary enormously and uh I think that was the
tricky part in playing him that um uh you had to focus a bit harder than others you couldn't get by in just natural moves because he could be playing genius moves or his level could drop a lot and he's even more vulnerable
I think psychologically than many others so um if he's not in the right frame of mind his level can plummet but equally um he can suddenly motivate himself to do great things and the hardest problem even is that he looks um totally
distracted during the game and that also uh lulls you into a false sense of security so you have to with him it's always psychology watching his face things like that which mattered more than the actual moves 1995 to fast
forward you beat Gasparov at the Intel Grand Prix Legend has it you spent only 10 minutes on your moves and this was a slow Classical game how did you manage that why only 10 minutes uh it was actually a rapid game it was a rapid
game it was a rapid game so we played it in Moscow and I kind of found myself playing against him I didn't um it was a morning session we had an evening session so both matches on the same day and um I just wanted to play something
relatively harmless so I played um uh some solid setup I thought today is not the day for the theoretical battle I just play something sensible came back and I'll just do something sensible and we'll worry about this another day theoretical battle
another day and um one of the in one of the things about Gary it doesn't come up very often obviously his results are very very um favorable to him but over a long enough career you notice it often enough you give him a position
where he's not very reactive and he thinks he has to lash out and this has nothing to do with this um understanding of Chess it's simply he has this urge to lash out and be tactical and for instance kramnik is lethal with him uh because he knew how to get the kind of positions where Gary would lash out and then he would punish it I my style didn't allow me to punish him quite so well so I've exploited it on fewer occasions but uh that one went
like a dream in Moscow and later and it made up for losing to him a little bit earlier in the month in riger so uh I was happy to win that against him then when I went and lost yanuk in the final who did his typical thing of suddenly
realizing his whole life dependent on this one game so I had I lost to him and then uh played the match against Gary a few months later speaking of kramnick in your match against kramnick you played 1 D4 a number of times which was
surprising why didn't he respond with the more hyper theoretical line like try the grinfeld say and try to catch you un prepared because usually you've played E4 in your career at least up till then that's right what had changed in the
meantime one is computers uh which meant that even a player who didn't have a lot of experience in an opening might simply have good computer moves and if you have good computer moves you understand them well and you play them um where they're
supposed to be played then understanding cannot make up for it the the computer evaluation the Gap is just too strong so imagine that the computer says this move and you're Plus one I'll take that against anyone I'll take that even against a specialist because those are pretty good odds in fact it is one of the things which has leveled preparation that a club player who who knows one opening well uh can play against a top grandmas in that opening
and so the top Grand Masters insight has to be take a look at the club player sort of gauge what work he might have done have a sense of what areas he specializes in then avoid them at all cost because that's the best strategy
for Success you avoid the club players preparation it doesn't matter if you you're playing it well or bad the difference in level will show but if you pled anything where the computer could have had a guiding hand you have pretty
bad anyway the thing with kramnik was that I had a team all of them were D4 Specialists we had eight months during which I could have trained a lot and we trained a lot on D we found interesting ideas I play training games again to get
make up for this lack of understanding play training games check it again with the computer uh go deeper and deeper try to understand hidden nuances and so on so I was pretty confident that we had lines prepared against the grunfeld
kings in fact I had a complete D4 repertoire start to finish even the most obscure lines the job for my second was give me a line that doesn't lose and I don't look embarrassing I can make a few moves come back and then we can go drill
deeper once we does if he does something unexpected so it wouldn't have been that easy um but if he had the confidence it wasn't the bad strategy to try he could have done it not because he thinks he's going to outplay me but because he he
thinks well I know this just as well as you and um uh let's see what you got it's it's that kind of thing so it's not quite as easy in fact I face this often myself in reverse that uh Kik used to play E4 suddenly a lot against me and
it's very nice to say I have more experience in him but where should I strike uh which is the area he's likely to be weakened that's not easy to pick out two of your wins with pla in that match are from the semi SLO you let you
get very tactical positions why would he make that kind of mistake that is very strange I I would have to say uh he took it personally he took this opening personally he just said but this is this opening my understanding of Chess
everything I believe in in chess on the chess board tells me this uh I'm better here and so he kept going back to it um first time it can happen I mean he plays a main line he thinks he's well prepared and then I have this slightly unusual
line that I've prepared at depth it goes bad but game five I think he took it personally by game eight I had moved on because I knew that uh allowing for everything we knew that his sense that he white was better was correct uh and
we had run as far with this as we should and we went to our second opening which is the vi and we went with that but um it's really only game five he took it personally he came in but once again we had outstanding prep and and by a
miracle um my trainer my polish trainer by Tek he literally you know we have this hurried conference from 2: to 2:25 or something where they just brush me up on everything and last minute stuff and everything so at about 220 radic said
look there's one thing I want to show you sit down so I sat down and he showed me this one line exactly which happened in game five and he said this is a terrible line I've been spending I've spent all night on it I finally found
an emergency solution it's an emergency parachute you play Rook C5 at this point the Rook is kind of active on this Rank and uh I've checked it it doesn't lose on the spot go um so his job was there's no way we can cover everything in chess I'm giving you uh sort of uh this position for dummies this is all you need to know and you'll have to figure out the rest on your own so I said okay so when I sat at the board and I had this chance to play
Rook C I thought thank God he he briefed me on this at this point so there's some luck as well and I knew every move I made I said Rook C5 I don't trust this position well but radic told me it works that's good enough and and so on so we
went with that and um uh and then he blundered but I was I was already in a very good situation I knew what I had to do I knew I was where I was supposed to be and I knew that I wasn't worse which is enough to take to the board your
match against aala if you had help from kramnick Gasparov Carlson how did they each help you differently and how does that reflect something about them as chess players um so Carlson he was he had already been my sparring partner before
the match with karnik and we repeated that so literally he came over we played three play of three days of Blitz five minute chess and the idea was I would select all the positions that I was going to use and play it against him and
we would not tell Carlson what we're going to play We Were using Carlson's strength as a practical player and saying if I surprise you with this let me see how you react uh maybe youve faced this before let me see how you react and try to play against that because I thought uh Carlson is of the level of Kik and topalov so playing against him gives me a good sense of how they'll play how the games will materialize and so on he did that in
both times he didn't help much during the match I think once in a while neelson was obviously in touch with him so they would chat on Skype or whatever and they would um he might give an impression but it wasn't more than that
um Kasparov would um call in a couple of times uh he gave me some of his notes in specific openings he said look they're outdated but uh for what it's worth uh here they are and you can check them with uh you know with modern analysis
and that's fine KL was the heaviest which is literally uh so by we he had come to the conclusion that kik's approach against too hadn't been a bad approach so we were copying the Catalan what we call the alista
variation of the slav defense and we were copying many aspects of how he plays that played that he doesn't like to be passive right is that how you think about it topalov yeah topalov doesn't like to be passive but he's also much more of a [Music]
um he actually can play positional chess incredibly well but um over the board he tends to lapse in this area and he's the gap between him between his positional play and his uh uh shop openings that he's really comfortable with is huge so
stylistically he's more limited um and the idea was you are a better natural player that than me uh so you should try to steer the game through to more harmless which is how we came on the niic approach more harmless Waters uh play sensible chess
and don't get into forc lines that much and you'll probably have the easier time of it I mean more of a philosophical thing so karnik called um kazim shanov on the after the fourth game and he said I'm it's a I'm flattered that um you are trying to copy my openings but you're doing it very badly uh can I help I mean literally B that's what he said uh which is the funniest uh story so we said of course you can help and I was amazed how
dedicated he was he could easily since he was he was just doing this on his own thing so he could have easily said I'll help you for an hour I would accept it I'll I'll look at your notes for 10 minutes I would accept it but um there
were days he he sat with the team uh till 5: in the morning working all night uh he had just gone to to play an event he played there uh and then at night he would work with us and um for the team it was great because we were getting his
insights into the opening we realized there was so much we had missed he started to think and every game he basically became my fifth second from game five till the final game and um I I couldn't possibly thank him enough so that was um and I had just beaten him two years ago in the match so again it was um I think his ability to put that aside that impressed me we had kind of um spoken a little bit the previous year about his newborn daughter
and kind of broke the ice but I was still feeling awkward um I thought it might take a bit of time for both of us to move on but in fact he he seemed to be able to take this very well and so they all uh uh helped me in different
ways and uh it was nice it was when you get that kind of feedback it of course gives you a l a lot of confidence in your 2013 game against aroni and atata when you played Bishop 15 for black Bishop C5 all the ensuing combinations and tactics how much of
that were you seeing in advance so that's literally this position right you and I played Bishop C5 so I'll tell you I spent 25 minutes in this position because I couldn't remember a thing I I vaguely remembered that uh sorry I'll move the pieces yeah uh that if he goes H3 then this is the draw I have to and that's what he should do right and that's a draw and Bishop B4 then that is some draw I think you take and Bishop B8 and then this Knight is
lose and the details are uh thing but when he played F4 I thought this move I don't remember at all and I I was um searching racking my brain to find out why and I could not figure it out then suddenly I had this uh almost a
something flashed in my head and this Knight was on this Square on D3 in your head in my head I suddenly some variation flashed where I had a knight on D3 I couldn't for the life of me connect it but I started to look is there
something the there obvious moves anyway I can do this trying to get to D3 right I can play E5 all based on the same ideas in the game but none of them seem to work this one is too slow he takes and he thing this one I mean he'll allow
me to take and recapture it so what's the deal eventually by uh elimination I realized it must be Bishop C5 there's nothing else but once I started look at Bishop C5 it started to look good to me and then then it closes very fast it's like
find um finding out 80% of the map then the rest fills in very fast it gets accelerated and you knew Knight D E5 was coming at that point that was a thing so uh I'll tell you I played Bishop C5 because if I if he takes I take he captures here then my dream my vision whatever is check and Knight captures D3 and then that Knight which pops into D3 works so um that's all I had to reconstruct but it is beautiful that with very little I was able to
reconstruct it now I went here aronian was a bit shocked because he had not given it a lot of attention but it was very courageous on him his part to even get here because I had prepared this for a match against girlfriend and the guy lets me uh and
basically says show me what you got show me what you and your team spent a month on yeah uh that's it's brave but it's also kind of irresponsible I mean unless you've checked it yourself very thoroughly so he seems to been slightly
flippant about it anyway um after Bishop B2 the rest played itself for me Bishop C5 took 25 minutes I don't remember Knight D5 might have taken me five minutes but more because I was double- cheing rather than anything but this
came effortlessly because already we are talking of this Knight has to support this one um the queen and Bishop are going to flood into D4 um Knight F2 check is going to win all these little dots so while this is maybe the most
spectacular move yes it's the less difficult move to find especially once you have done this yes so now if you ask me before I saw Bishop C5 did I see Knight D5 right I did not even see Bishop E2 I was more focused on the main thing I didn't see Bishop B2 so once he played Bishop B2 the obvious everything else filled itself and uh I flooded in and of course uh the big Advantage was by now um rotl robenstein was coming into my head so I knew that
um I knew what happens well we'll get the structure a bit later but I knew what happens when you get this bishop this bishop all pointing in this direction smothered mate H3 becomes impossible this was roughly speaking this was rot robinin with a knight here and um um it's a classic game in J history and so I knew the patterns and and all all the details check out so one SE night D5 the rest came pretty fast there was only one more thing I had to
find King H1 Knight takes G4 again every move loses except what he did and then F5 is a brilliant move F5 is fantastic because for a dangerously long time and later on you shiver when you you shudder when you realize what you could have
done for quite some time I consider this move yeah but then Queen H7 and a draw right or maybe you're even maybe even I'm worse but the beauty is U it was this move was slightly easier to find because 7 years ago kramnik had allowed
uh Queen H 7 against Fritz mate and karnik and pretty much everyone said there is no way I would have allowed Queen F7 if the Knight had been on F6 right because to a human immediately it signals danger all over
the place but a knight on f8 you almost forget it's there uh whereas for a computer it sees that both moves allow Queen at seven so at some point I realized oh my God 7 well that would spoil a very nice position then by elimination again I could play
F5 and once again all the dots and the queen will come to H4 in one way or another it will be over and then you just knew you're completely winning and there's one more detail if you like which is that here I have to play this
yeah but it's it it wins it's the only move which doesn't lose but it's the but it also wins so when Magnus did The Lex Reedman podcast he drew a distinction between chess players who see only short lines but are great at evaluation he
called himself of those or kowana who calculates very long lines but is not as good at evaluation does that dichotomy make sense to you very much it's uh it's just the way your brain processes uh thoughts so some people fill in the gaps
intuitively uh when the when the pieces feel right when the broad U picture looks right the answers will come to you and you're guided more by this sense of uh what what is good and not of course Karana does it as well to but to
a lower degree so he calculates a lot more to fill in the gaps and therefore karwana is a lot better at finding exceptions the natural players Miss exceptions because what looks good to them well they happen to stumble on the
one position where what looks good isn't good and uh it hurts them Karana tends to miss that less often because he's not in fact kar's approach you could almost exaggerate and say it's closer to a computer than many other humans um of
course he's 1% of the way closer but it doesn't matter and um there are players who approach chess in a more systematic way and they are the ones who tend to find exceptional ideas and things like that because of their the way they don't
um um rule out stuff just on dogmatic grounds or something like that and um but we are talking very small differences I I think um karan's understanding is uh much closer to let's say Carlson's than thing but uh yes his approach is to
look Cal everything and look for very specific Solutions Carlson's as he say hand will make the move you know you just know where the pieces go and then you don't need the details and how do you prepare differently against each type of player I don't uh I don't get down to that level of detail if I was playing a match I could try to incorporate that my Approach but so much of Chess is just um uh getting the the opening right the moves right the
concepts right that you don't have time to micro Target like that it just doesn't work uh at least not for me perhaps others um are able to do it I I would think the maximum level you could do it at is to um choose the kind of opening which
favors you the most intuitively and say from what I know of my opponent this is the position where he's fidgeting uncomfortably in his chair and once you've chosen the opening you hope that well that Insight actually plays out um
but at least for me I've never been able to Target much more like I said when I was playing I I use my insight into thing to say well these openings will work for me and you know he'll he'll get impatient he'll try to do something active maybe I can punish him but once I've done that the rest are the rest are just long lines and I can't uh use that Insight anymore in within the games you'll have flashes of this at most but uh chess is actually
mostly uh long variations what goes on inside your head during a match that no normal human could guess at surprisingly how distracted we are um during a match uh even at even in very critical moments I'll be thinking what I
can have a dinner what I should have done yesterday that oh I met that jerk yesterday and you know this kind of stuff and your brain wanders off and it's almost it's almost take like taking your foot off the gas you uh your brain wants
to wander off for a while you let it and then you come back and or you keep one part focused on what's happening but while your opponent is thinking you can wander off uh I I think whenever somebody tells me I don't know how you concentrate for 7 hours I understand that they don't know how we play chess uh or that they haven't played chess themselves because we do not concentrate for 7 hours very few people do it and I would think even they
the brain simply says goes on strike periodically and then comes back so I think that's how it works you've argued in your career you had a down period something like 2011 to 2013 until recently kowana seemed to have a down
period for a while why does that happen to very top players it's very hard to explain um I mean if you could even see it coming you could start to think about it but my feeling is it catches most people off guard they they repeat a recipe probably too
long um and it's not like anybody else spoted it coming suddenly notice hey he's not winning after one or two tournaments you think he's not winning quite as much is used to didn't he and then you take a look and you realize
that slowly some um um resistance has built up in this games resistance to the free flow the most natural flow but um it's very hard to see it coming and then when you're stuck in it it's very hard to see how to get out of it and in most
cases at least in my experience the way to get out of it is to stop thinking about how to solve it and almost lighten yourself and get back to playing um a normal game for normal reasons and You' think that method could be refined and you could apply it systematically but it it uh but if it did nobody would have slumps anymore in form so there is something clearly that uh we can't quite pick up on it's a kind of staleness that gets into your game
it's probably an accumulation that if you're doing too well for too long others have been working non-stop trying to understand you and at some point without you or them realizing it the Gap is closed and then you're encountering
more resistance you're doing what worked perfectly before but you're encountering more resistance you can't see why and your opponents don't understand why they're not losing but they suddenly think he this worked out better for me
and somehow the Gap closes and the time has come for you to move on try something else uh bring some fresh uh perspective what's your favorite Monty Python skit um I like the one with the Pope uh there's several with the Pope
well that's true that's true well basically Michelangelo Michelangelo Michelangelo yeah that's a good one I like argument Clinic very much yes and there's a lot of uh nice nice stuff with the ministry of silly walks and uh parrot is very good yes Cheese Shop
is very good yes the dead parot is very good summer o PR do you know that one uh they didn't show that one that much yeah no that I missed but uh uh those were nice and also the Y Shaman the these guys all talking about how poor they
were in their childhood that's that's fantastic I love I love the idea of uh a cardboard box in the highway was Faulty Towers ever as good as Monty Python I'll tell you the first time I was staying with uh I visited the
Indian um Cil General in uh the ha and he invited me to stay for lunch because uh he's also from Jenai so he invited me to stay for lunch and uh so I said well that's very nice thank you I'll stay um either before we were about
to have lunch and or about uh or um after we had had lunch he said okay I'll put some he put a cassette in and it was faulty TS and I started watching at first I didn't understand the humor at all I wasn't even that familiar with
montypython then so it gives you an idea but the humor seems strange and then there's always this one situation which is so absurd uh that you just can't stop laughing and at some point I was laughing but like a person who could not stop and uh I was choking almost and that's when I knew so I would have to say fatita is as good there are lines which are fantastic that are simply um don't mention the war right don't mention the war yeah maybe
I've just watched it way too much but um this hotel inspector is great um the health inspector is good um and uh what I love is this um blind old well this deaf old lady who comes by and U complains about everything and uh he
says U what were you expecting from a hotel window talking and also the lovely thing yes Madam that's the sea it's between the land and the sky just perfect stuff what's the most underrated Queen song um I don't know I I I rate all of them
very highly um bright and rock I might pick I've heard Bohemian rap city too many times at this point yes I've heard Bohemian rap city as well and my problem is my son recently discovered Queen so we listen to it again almost an
overdrive um I don't think I don't think I have a underrated Queen song I'm aware that out there there might be songs that are under they're all underrated in your here right yeah but for me they I rate them perfectly highly yeah yeah um but I I
have this habit of listening to my four or five favorite songs in an album and kind of ignoring the ones I don't like so uh my son is more disciplined in that way he'll actually listen to the whole album yeah so he ask me questions about
songs and some I'll be I'll give him two-hour descriptions other ones I'll say you know I've never heard one in chess opening preparation mean where does that end what's the bottleneck does it just keep on going until the first 33
moves are prepackaged some lines will go that far but uh equally you can use the computer to solve the problem that the computer's created which is that if you take a single line and you go think can go very very far but you can also deviate at an
earlier and earlier stage and you can always um you can have it running on 20 lines and you go for line number 17 and you think and you'll find that you're not able to work it out just as thoroughly you need time to do it and
before you do that you move to the next one so no one's quite able to nail every possibility you can always surprise someone uh we saw this with ding recently andish he actually went H3 in one position yeah it surprise backfired
because um Yan seemed to know exactly which line to play and uh he went for the one line where H3 turns out to be a disadvantage that's very hard to nail down you have to get quite deep into it mostly that works and um but yes even
with that qualification the opening preparation everywhere is is just building up and up and up there are lines I neglect for 6 months and then I come back to them and I realize my God I have to update everything I I'm not sure
of anything any of this preparation anymore the problem in preparation is not whether it's detailed the problem is whether you can believe in it and if you have not checked it 100% it's worthless I mean and it's like a 99% guarantee
before you go to the operation you want to have 100% guarantee right so it's um uh 99% is simply not good enough and that's the problem with opening preparation as well that uh the computer allows you to question everything every
new version every new program every new piece of Hardware each one of those things can drive it so every 6 months or a year you start have to start all over again cleaning your stuff on the other hand it's a one of the great joys in
chess research is to come to an opening that youve not seen in 5 years and that first day you're discovering everything new everything single line you refute and clean up and you feel like you've cleaned your entire house of
clutter and you feel wonderful so that's it's it's a double-edged sword I will concede that but it's a pain in the neck when you want to rely on something that people are playing the Geo piano again is it that we've discovered it's
better than ruy Lopez or just we're sick of all the old lines and we're going to try something different for three years and then move on and the two nights game is even coming a bit into fashion and is is it cycling or continuous Improvement
it's a lot of it cycling at some point I don't remember maybe five or six years ago there was a kind of individualistic Collective sense that maybe the ropas is neglected territory Virgin Territory let's go back there and try that because
of Italian and the gapo my God there's nothing left to find and then we do everybody goes after the ropas for a year and suddenly couple of guys say let's look at the Italian again and you think ah there are a few things we
haven't picked up on so you swing back there and it goes like this but um it's an arms race and we're not winning was it a kind of Market inefficiency that the king's Indian defense could survive for so long I mean Roger BAU did pretty
well with it until recently you've played it a fair amount but it just seems like a bad move right there's a time when it um uh it looked it looked just lost yeah no I mean there was a time maybe five six years ago when the
Kings didn't just looked lost because the computer always said it was lost and recently maybe even a year ago the computer said no I confirm it's dead lost but people have always sense that there's something fundamentally unsound
about the Kings Indian but it we couldn't quite prove it and that is why people are going on you know the famous quote of Coach right he said he told Yun pet the Kings Indian is not an opening it's a disease yes and so he was
basically uh he had it right all along um and so recently Fabiano uh started playing head six in the Kings Indian the classical Kings Indian and the beauty of that is it's not quite um refutable uh it's got just enough life to drag on for
a while and uh and people come to parts of the Kings Indian that they like so the Kings Indian that are lines you that you find difficult to play but if you come in from a grunfeld move order and white does something against anti-
grunfeld and you swing from there back to the Kings Indian or you come come from a benoni move order and you get into the Kings Indian or even you put the bishop on E7 and rotate it this way that way Kings Indian Concepts turn out
to be very very Dynamic and healthy uh even if you're not getting to it in the same structure opening so uh Kings Indian players have found a way to get the you know the Kings Indian fixed for the week uh without having to go down
the old main line and that's how it goes but um computers will contradict themselves every couple of years so maybe the pentalum has swung to Father's Side does Fisher random have a future or it's just a side thing forever Fisher
random actually has a brilliant future because it is a um it's a form of Chess which has not been understood at all um however with this thing Fisher random was conceived as a way of um avoiding opening Theory later on people
rediscovered it as a way ofo avoiding computers now we realize we're not avoiding computers at all they're just as good at Fisher random or no castling as they are at chess uh new versions we're never going to catch up with computers but for
playing amongst ourselves this is uh completely new territory and we can there's a lot of scope for creativity and everything we used to uh look for so um it's the it's it's an opening with a lot of it's a variant with with a lot of uh
promise maybe the one CH players are most comfortable with however in the meantime I have played no no castling a few times yes that turns out to be fascinating the first time I sat with uh my computer and I had to play Knight F3
Rook G1 uh and repeated Four Corners all four Rooks and knights so that white couldn't Castle anymore and then switch on the engine and uh analyze openings like this and I realized that um almost every opening can be reevaluated if
you're King Con castle and so everywhere the right plan turns out to be H4 H5 Rook H4 uh thing except the ones where it's not and you don't there are no general rules yet or we have not come that far so we find uh every little uh
detail now there are lots of other versions that are coming up and you can versions you can have as many as you dream of so you can have pawns moving sideways pawns capturing um uh straight and um moving horizontal I mean
diagonally you can have every which variant you want you program it into the computer and let it play a million games and see what come pops out so um this may be a solution for the distant future but for the moment uh chest looks healthy enough
especially um if you vary people who have played too much classical chess have a round of faster controls and then when you done too many faster controls you go back to classical and if you keep wearing like this that's
one one thing that keeps uh uh the game moving along the second thing that works very well is for instance what they do in tata steel which is to have a Mixed Field not all super prepared uh uh top GMS but a mixture of very young uh
courageous young Juniors with um top GMS you have that mix that also leads to a lot of unpredictability so um if you keep moving around you change the format change the variant change the time control change this change that you just
keep shuffling uh we can go on for quite some time is there a chance that 10 years from now say rapid play is the World Chess Championship I wouldn't rule it out uh I wouldn't rule it out but I feel that um uh classical would still exist it's just
public taste would have moved along um and the same could be said for Blitz Jess if you want um and we're also dealing now with um thanks to the revolution of the last five or six years uh which in general I mean um what happened with the Queen's Gambit what happened uh the last couple of years which is that um maybe the number of people who are casual fans of Chess are far greater than serious fans of Chess sure of course and uh they are
actually following the game now whereas before they would follow it once in a while now they actually have a impact and you sense it in the numbers and uh thanks to them I think I think they may not have this old attachment to uh
classical chess um they may also not know who capablanca was but [Music] um and when when that is felt in the sport then the sport will inevitably cater to their tastes more and more but I I don't think that uh classical chess
will disappear it's just that it used to be 100% of Chess then for the last couple of decades it's been about 80% of Chess now I would say it's closer to 30 40% of chess uh which Le leaves the other variant fighting with 60% the other time controls fighting with 60% and it's a question of the mix the there will always be some role for having a lot of time to think and find interesting stuff but I all the time is very hard especially given modern
preparation how is it you think that playing so much as a streamer seems to have made Nakamura better psychologically better too right I don't think the streaming helps him uh become a better player but what it has done is
it's taken a lot of pressure off him uh he really felt he had only one way to show who he was and that was the chess board and now he suddenly realizes I've got this other method uh where people appreciate me and cheer me um in fact
many years ago in 2011 in tata steel he made a winner speech and I was kind of surprised the way he said he said it's so wonderful to be in Holland where we're appreciated for our chess in the US nobody would care or something like
that and he did this as the winner in the closing speech uh and I thought well quite a strange thing to say but but um if you keep that thought in the background now he he's got the adulation he wants um in fact he seems to Crave it
he goes back and uh does a recap every day and things like that he really seems to want it um what I think is helping him is playing Blitz tournaments non-stop online um that allows him to keep there and it might be the best way
to train for a modern computerized opening preparation era where there's so little to do with preparation because the computer solves everything but you get to test every concept th a million times practic over the board and uh
that's why he's so good at it and that's why all the the best players now are playing these online uh Blitz events you can put me on the spot and saying well if you think that's the case why aren't you doing it I haven't gotten around I
do some training online but I don't feel like sitting from midnight till 3:00 in the morning uh playing online Blitz um these Tuesday events and so on but um if you were much younger could you imagine yourself as a
streamer it pays well I can imagine being a streamer now very easily uh but what I don't see myself doing is U spending all night also I don't feel like playing that much Blitz uh I always tell myself I should do a bit more but
um in the end the body just doesn't get up and then that's it you you just don't go there uh I easily see myself uh trying streaming or something but it's a question of how long you want to invest in it I mean again success is not going
to come very fast uh there you know there's a lot of of crocodiles already in that bank uh you'll have to in that Watering Hole you'll have to spend some quite some time in do stuff daily and things like that and it's so it's a big
time commitment is what I'm trying to say and then um so I could very easily see myself doing it um and I've done versions of it over the last couple of years I did a lot of online coaching um lots of my talks that I used to give for
companies I do online as well nowadays so I've done versions of it I could see myself doing that um especially commentary how difficult is it uh instead of going to a tornament and doing commentary from there just to sit
in your room and do it it's very easy so um that I could see the other bit probably I'm just a bit old MH I think it was mvl who made the remark that in a post alphazero world what we've learned is how much chess is truly the concrete
and how few generalizations there are does that make sense to you or what do you think we've learned from alpha zero that's uh that's a broader Trend I I don't even know if it starts with Alpha zero but um uh maybe that's where it
became the most visible but he's right um there are no general principles anymore if the computer says um in fact new general principles emerge [Music] um nowadays we push the H and aons so um whenever we want and it's not a
bad move but uh 20 years ago these moves would have been considered betraying the complete lack of in chest education now it's not there so U everything we used to think was bad we're forced to evaluate move by move some of them will turn out to be bad many of them won't and you'll just have to know specific reasons and you'll just have to get into the details so he's he's right about that I think it's probably the the cry from a person who's
having to prepar this stuff all the time but anyway he's he's right I think um just nowadays it's about finding out uh exceptions to everything and that's where a lot of the growth is a CH player because all of us we are hardwired to
think these things are good these things are bad but imagine that uh you now have to wander in the field of everything you thought was bad and realize that half of it might be good that's kind of where we see ourselves now Rook g w against the
nidorf is that a novelty move or actually a very good move because no one played it in the time of fiser right no not at all but even when Fisher played H3 people thought what the hell is this and then they said oh but Fisher did it
it's okay so you you need a stamp of approval and the computer is now the new stamp of approval rook1 by the way predates um Alpha zero and it predates modern uh engines we're talking at least 15 20 years um Bishop D2 on move six
that is such nonsense even when the computer is running I think but this is nonsense uh the fact that it doesn't lose on the spot tells me that um um especially with a computer it doesn't lose on the spot tells me nothing but
this is nonsense but there are people who play it and then next thing you know there Theory building up and U at age 53 you're still in the world top 10 there's no one else in the top 10 close to your age and you were have been
India's number one for what 37 years 38 years 37 years uh what keeps you going what motivates you I I like playing chess couple of years ago I I decided to um that maybe you know playing full-time playing the whole year round and trying
to compete at the highest level was wasn't worth it in terms of the amount of time and effort I would have to put in for the results I expected so I decided to semi-retire um a decision Made Easy in the pandemic because everyone was
semi-retired in the pandemic but the key thing was not to come back after the pandemic was over so I played a little bit here and there whenever I could because I still like playing and I like for chest tournaments are primarily
social events where you meet everyone and you hang out with everyone again so when I did all that I enjoyed myself and then I would say okay now for four months I'm not going to play anything much longer break than before also I'm
living in India more or less the whole time when I'm not playing so that's uh incre changed a lot uh some of it is family uh you know uh my son is growing up so you also want to um prioritize what um you're doing with your time and so on
but uh I really enjoy the few tournaments that I play so when I play these rapid and blitzes and I have these one or two events in the year I try to four or five months months before leading up to them I start training again uh just to get
back in this Frame of Mind where it's chess is not just some philosophical thing where you can do this and you can do that it's concrete moves like mvl said and the most important skill in chess is if I was sitting at a board
with the clock ticking what would I make in this position and then suddenly the infinite variety of choices you have becomes irrelevant you have to make only one move and how do you switch to that frame of mind um I try to stick there
but I I really love um analyzing and working on chess and and maybe even just like for Hikaru um having something else fill part of your life allows you to come back to chess with much more enthusiasm um these long breaks then when I get back to chess I'm much more enthusiastic about playing and I look forward to it so um that might be a huge fact as well do you hate losing as much as Kasparov does to me it seems he isn't even close to me but
um I admit I can't see him from the inside and he probably can't see me from the inside when I lose I can't imagine anyone in the world who loses as badly as I do inside so you think you're the worst at losing at least uh that I know of and um
a couple of years ago I know people say but how are you such a good loser and I'd say I'm not a good loser I'm a good actor uh I I know how to com stay composed in public uh I can even pretend for 5 minutes but I can only do it for 5
minutes because I know that once the uh press conference is over or once I can finish talking to you I can go back to my room and hit my head against the wall because that's what I'm longing to do now and in fact it's gotten even worse because as you get on you think I should have known that I should have known that I should have known not to do that what the what is the point of doing this a thousand times and not learning anything
you get angry with yourself much more so I hate losing much more uh even than before I think there's an interview with Magnus on YouTube and they ask him to rate your sanity on the scale of 1 to 10 I don't know if you've seen this and he
gives you a 10 is he wrong uh no he's completely right um he's completely right I think sanity is uh being able to show the world that you are sane even when you're in and therefore I'm I'm I'm 11 overall how happy a lot do you think
top chess players are say top 20 players I think they're very happy uh they they understand that they're able to be chess players uh and that they can have a pretty good life doing so so just like anybody who finds that uh they're doing what they
wanted to do what they would be doing anyway even in under worse circumstances but they're able to do it in a pretty nice way and challenging way uh then we understand we're privilege in fact the funny thing is how many chess players
are happy even not being top players uh because they chess is again one of these callings you you find yourself in it and uh you really enjoy it it's it's very quite hard for a chess player to quit and switch to something else they always
have this Gap uh this time lag I was quite surprised to see when Kenneth rof uh became an economist as I did yeah yeah well he became an economist but recently maybe seven eight years ago uh somebody asked him uh
so um what's it like thinking about Chess again because he had come to a chess tournament he said but I never stopped thinking about it and for me that was strange because I would assume that after 5 years you it drops way
below but apparently he kept at it all that time he would think about Chess every day when I see economics ah right well there's the want to talk economics with me sure if you had to boil down your your your cognitive ability or abilities into as
small a number of Dimensions as possible what what's the cognitive ability you have that makes you special um I think the ability well is it cognitive the ability to um pull out um details from a mass of uh information
that I've seen so in chess we may see a thousand games from this and then at the board I may be able to distill the right idea from all that so being able to extract um uh useful ideas from a lot of information uh also good visual uh um
intelligence in just in in chess the only skill which a top CH player has to have really is the sense that something is going wrong and that's a visual thing because with very few details you suddenly think N I feel uncomfortable there's something wrong
here that's uh one of the most important skills you can have in chess um and besides probably just the usual mix bit of memory uh good memory at least for things that I'm interested in um ability to focus uh on one thing and
then keep at it so and is there some other area where you have also a remarkable ability um wow so Magnus seems to be great at Fantasy Football some chess players are great at Bridge um I'm I'm sort of good in games and uh
um lots of these games you play Just For Fun immediately I find that I start at an acceptable level so maybe there is some skill there but have not um um thought about it that much last two questions there's so many talented young
chess players from Tom aladu obviously you know them you play with them and if you're looking for who will really climb to the top like prago gukesh other than just how well they play at the moment what else do you look for
um if they're very young I want to see a certain amount of fanaticism I think fanaticism is good when you're in your teens um but quite a few of them have that [Music] um I think maturity is maybe the most important thing U because prananda and
gesh have taken some horrible blows but what I've realized uh is that they're quite strong in a way that I'm Amazed maybe because I I for me losing hurt so much more I can no longer understand people who are relaxed about losing uh
and maybe I was once more relaxed I don't know but um prag and gkes both have taken some of the tough times recently quite well and come out of it now they're both uh going gang busters and it that's great but uh they've had
difficult times as well um and there are things I look for on the chess board just um a sense that they understand a lot of stuff without having to um just like I mentioned earlier they know where the pieces go and
uh if I if I look at their games I can quickly get a sense of which area they focus in I mean some of them uh have no understanding of Chess at all but they have amazing sporting qualities which is that they tenacious they're able to keep
resisting you can see that they don't have this dip of being annoyed with themselves about the position and therefore their uh performance goes down if anything they're still finding only moves they're still hanging in there um so some things like this will alert me to some sporting qualities um but um the chess qualities I think I look for first uh if not I wonder well they don't have this what could I what they possibly bring to the table that
compensates for it and then I realize ah they have these other sporting qualities maybe even their Fitness their ability to hang in there things like that last question where's the best place to eat in Shai um you should go to some of these uh
Udupi homes and we have some uh places where they serve traditional South Indian breakfast I think that uh and not in the bigger places you have to Italy I went to that was very good you know it that yeah m is very good there's
some nice udipi joints there's matsa you can try that um we go to the old Dasa chain as well that there used to be something called Dasa prash so um that's nice if you and then you get how well for me it's almost a childhood
thing literally that's how we used to snack when um and besides that some place which with a good Tali gives you I think a good sampling of everything in uh both South Indian and Indian Cuisine fishand thank you very much thank you pleasure