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BGonline.org Forums
World Chess Champion Anand on practicing with a real board
Posted By: Timothy Chow
Date: Friday, 3 August 2012, at 11:08 p.m.
Recently, I made the following statement:
I feel that an important part of the equation is that Stick doesn't play live matches enough. I listened to a lecture by World Chess Champion Viswanathan Anand who said that an important part of his training was to play with a real chessboard against an assistant who had access to a chess engine. He found that if he just stared at the computer screen all day, then somehow his knowledge wouldn't transfer so readily to live play as much as you would think it would. Playing with a real board against a live opponent was important psychologically.
In response, storm said that I was "paraphrasing quite freely," which I took to mean that my summary was misleading. Here, to clarify, is exactly what Anand said.
Right before a tournament, I like to spend a week sort of distancing myself from this kind of research work we do, and try to get into the frame of mind where you're actually going to play a game. So for a week or so before a match, I tend to sit with the chessboard—you know, smell the wood, make moves again, try to remember the analysis without any help—and it's amazing: If you analyze a position with a computer running in the background and you have one eye on it, you tend to be calm in the most crazy positions, and you also tend to effortlessly identify what the computer says that's important and what the computer says that might not be. But you cut yourself off from that flow of information, and suddenly you start having so many doubts. And then it's important to write those doubts down, because those are the doubts you'll actually have at the chessboard. And this transition is very important to manage.
Then you also try to solve certain typical positions—usually endgames and middle game techniques. You practice that again, and everything becomes a question of visualizing yourself at the board, trying to remember the emotions associated with it. Like sometimes...right before my recent World Championship match, at the very end, I would ask my trainers to put a few of the key positions that I'm supposed to defend at the board and say, you know, "Just play them out with me; you can have access to the correct information but I'll try and see if I remember stuff." And there are positions that when we analyzed them I was very calm because the computer kept saying that the side I was playing was completely fine. But cut off from that, suddenly you can't believe you're going to play this stuff, because your king is running all over the place. It looks like you're going to get mated; it's really scary.
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