Viswanathan Anand: From Chennai to the Top of the Chess World
The World Chess Championship had been dominated by Europeans and Americans since its very first match in 1886. Then came a boy from Chennai who played so fast the other players used to joke: "Has Anand finished yet?" He didn't just win the World Championship. He permanently ended chess's old world order.
Born in Madras — The Lightning Kid
Viswanathan Anand was born on December 11, 1969, in Mayiladuthurai, Tamil Nadu, India, into a Tamil Brahmin family. His father Krishnamurthy was a retired General Manager of Southern Railways. His mother Sushila — herself a chess enthusiast — taught him the game at the age of six. He had an older brother and sister, both more than a decade his senior. The youngest child, the quiet one, the one who had chess sets where other children had toys.
As Paul van der Sterren writes in Kings of the Chessboard: "At the time, India had no chess culture to speak of. Fifty years on it is a great chess nation with many tournaments and top players — with Anand a superstar." That transformation is not a coincidence. It is a monument to what one person can do to a country when they win at the highest level.
He moved to the Philippines at age 9, where he deepened his chess education. By 14 he had won the Indian National Sub-Junior Championship with a perfect score — nine wins, nine games. At 15 he became the youngest Indian to earn the International Master title. At 16 he was the National Chess Champion of India. In 1987 he became India's first-ever Grandmaster — at 18, the youngest in the world at that time.
The nickname came early. He played so fast that spectators could barely follow. In India they called him "the Lightning Kid." The chess world would later know him as "the Tiger of Madras." Both names fit. One described the speed. The other described what waited behind it.
The Style — Invisible Until It Isn't
Anand's style is the hardest of all the World Champions to define — and van der Sterren in Kings of the Chessboard makes exactly that observation: "Anand's style is hard to describe, perhaps because he does not seem to 'steer' his games. He doesn't appear to have a preference for one type of position over another, is equally good at all aspects of the game and has an uncanny knack of conjuring brilliant moves out of thin air."
That phrase — conjuring brilliant moves out of thin air — captures something essential. Anand was not a stylist in the way Tal was explosive or Petrosian was suffocating. He simply saw moves. Moves that weren't there for other people. Moves that appeared from nowhere, played in seconds, that other grandmasters would need hours to find and still might miss.
At Wijk aan Zee in 1990, playing Rini Kuijf, Anand played a move that completely refuted the opponent's preparation in one shot — a move that, as van der Sterren notes, "one seemingly effortless move, played almost without thinking by Anand, turns out to be sufficient to totally refute the theoretical evaluation of the line." The game lasted under an hour. It was played in the first round. For the rest of that tournament, van der Sterren writes, it was a running gag among the other participants: when the games had barely started, players would jokingly ask each other, "Has Anand finished yet?"
Against Karpov at Las Palmas 1996, he produced what van der Sterren describes as "the hallmark of the most pure, sparkling talent" — foregoing a perfectly reasonable position with an extra pawn and a draw in the bag, in favour of a piece sacrifice with unpredictable consequences. Against Aronian at Wijk aan Zee 2013, he played 15...Bc5!! and then 16...Nde5!! — two moves that van der Sterren says "even a World Champion and possibly even their computer engines would be proud of."
He was equally dangerous in every time format. Classical, rapid, blitz — Anand was among the world's best in all three. He is one of the very few players in history to have been crowned World Champion in both classical and rapid chess.
The Chaos of the World Championship — 1990 to 2007
Anand first entered the World Championship cycle in 1990 at the Manila Interzonal, qualifying for the Candidates Matches. He lost to Karpov in the quarterfinals in Brussels in 1991. Then, in 1993, Kasparov split from FIDE and suddenly there were two World Championships to win.
Anand navigated this chaos better than almost anyone. In 1995 he faced Kasparov in a match in New York — held at the top of the World Trade Center — in one of the most spectacular settings in chess history. He lost, but the match was competitive and confirmed him as the best challenger Kasparov had faced.
In 1997, van der Sterren notes, he won the FIDE knock-out World Championship in Groningen — but FIDE had decreed that the winner should play a short final match against Karpov, who had been waiting fresh while Anand competed through the full grueling tournament. Miraculously Anand tied the regular match 3-3 — then lost the tiebreak 0-2, his reserves exhausted. The championship was taken from him in the most unfair of circumstances.
In 2000, he won the FIDE World Championship tournament in New Delhi and Tehran — becoming the first Asian World Chess Champion in history. He held the FIDE title until 2002. He did not participate in the 2004 FIDE championship, which was controversially held in Libya.
In all, as van der Sterren summarizes with characteristic precision: "For Anand the era of the double World Championship (1993-2006) resulted in one match against Kasparov, which he lost, and one FIDE title. Not a bad harvest!" It is a remarkably understated way of describing two decades of excellence in the most chaotic era in championship history.
The Undisputed Champion — Mexico City 2007
When chess finally reunified in 2006, Anand was ready. He had been waiting for this moment for years.
In 2007, FIDE organized an eight-player double round-robin World Championship tournament in Mexico City. Anand won it — finishing a point ahead of defending champion Vladimir Kramnik. He was 37 years old. As van der Sterren notes, it was the first time since Steinitz that a new World Champion was older than his predecessor.
A year later, he silenced any possible questioning of his title's legitimacy by defeating Kramnik in a match in Bonn — 6½ to 4½. The chess world was finally reunited. Anand was its undisputed champion.
What followed was one of the most successful championship reigns of the modern era. He defended the title against Topalov in 2010 in Sofia — a match made famous when an Icelandic volcanic eruption grounded flights across Europe and Anand had to travel to the match by road across multiple countries, arriving exhausted. He still won 6½ to 5½, winning the decisive final game under enormous pressure. Against Gelfand in Moscow in 2012, the match was tied after twelve games — Anand won the rapid tiebreak. Five World Championship victories in total. Five times he had to prove he was the best in the world. Five times he did.
The Fall — Carlsen 2013 and 2014
In 2013, Magnus Carlsen challenged Anand for the title in Chennai — on Anand's home soil, in front of a home crowd. Carlsen was 22. Anand was 43. And Carlsen was simply better. He won 6½ to 3½ in a match that was less competitive than the score suggests.
What happened next showed exactly who Anand was. Rather than retiring or fading, he immediately won the 2014 Candidates Tournament in Khanty-Mansiysk — defeating players twenty years younger than him to earn another shot at the title. He then faced Carlsen again in Sochi. He lost again — 6½ to 4½. But the fact that he came back at all, at 44, and competed for the title again, told the chess world everything it needed to know about his competitive drive.
He remained a top-ten player for years after losing the title. At an age when most champions had long since faded, Anand was still competing at the elite level — still winning tournaments, still producing brilliant games, still the same Lightning Kid who had played so fast in Wijk aan Zee in 1990 that his colleagues joked about whether he had finished yet.
Facts That Nobody Tells You
What He Left Behind
Viswanathan Anand did not just win five World Championships. He permanently changed where chess belongs in the world.
Before Anand, chess was European. It had been European for five hundred years — Russian, Soviet, German, Dutch, American. The idea that a player from Asia could not only compete but dominate was simply not part of the chess world's assumptions. Anand demolished those assumptions so thoroughly and so gracefully that the chess world barely had time to notice the revolution was happening.
The generation he inspired is now taking over the game entirely. Gukesh Dommaraju — the 18-year-old Indian who became World Champion in 2024 — is a direct product of the chess culture Anand created. Praggnanandhaa, Arjun Erigaisi, Nihal Sarin — all products of the same Indian chess boom that Anand sparked when he became the country's first Grandmaster in 1988.
Van der Sterren captures the magnitude of this: "While Bobby Fischer may have interrupted the post-WWII hegemony of the Soviets for a few years, it was Anand who permanently ended the far older European-American domination in chess." Fischer was an interruption. Anand was a transformation.
He still plays. He still competes at elite level. He coaches. He mentors. At an age when most former champions have long since become analysts and commentators, Anand is still a player — still the same man who learned chess from his mother in Chennai in 1975, who played so fast in Wijk aan Zee in 1990 that his colleagues asked each other if he had finished yet.
The Lightning Kid never stopped playing. He just got older. Chess got younger around him. And somehow, impossibly, he kept up.
And as of July 23, 2026 — just days before this article was written — Anand became the interim President of FIDE, the world chess federation, after incumbent president Arkady Dvorkovich stepped aside following the European Union's decision to include him in its 21st sanctions package against Russia. In accordance with the FIDE Charter, the duties of the President passed to the Deputy President — Anand, who has served in that role since 2022. The Lightning Kid, at 56 years old, now leads the entire global chess world.
Take Your Chess Further
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His Greatest Games — Study Them Yourself
You can find all of these on chessgames.com
- Anand vs Karpov — Las Palmas 1996 (the piece sacrifice van der Sterren calls pure sparkling talent)
- Anand vs Aronian — Wijk aan Zee 2013 (15...Bc5!! and 16...Nde5!!)
- Anand vs Topalov — World Championship 2010, Game 12 (must-win, delivered)
- Anand vs Kramnik — World Championship 2008, Game 3
- Anand vs Gelfand — World Championship 2012, tiebreak Game 2
- Anand vs Kasparov — PCA World Championship 1995, Game 10
- Kuijf vs Anand — Wijk aan Zee 1990 (the game that ended before anyone else had started)
- Anand vs Carlsen — World Championship 2013, Game 5
- Anand vs Ivanchuk — Linares 1992
- Anand vs Shirov — FIDE World Championship 2000, Final
Every champion before him was European or American. Anand changed that so completely, so permanently, that a generation later the chess world simply assumes it was always this way. That is what a true revolution looks like — when it becomes impossible to imagine the world before it.
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