Chinmayee Srivathsa's Weblog

A Rendezvous with Vishwanathan Anand!

Friday Dec 22, 2006

The world's no.2 chess player was at Sun India Engineering Center on Dec 21st and a few of us at Sun (yes, me included) got a chance to play against him. Viswanathan Anand played a round of simultaneous chess games with us. I (playing White) started with the usual King's pawn opening(1. e4) and he played the Sicilian defence(1..c5). There wasn't enough time to complete the games and Anand proceeded to an informal interaction session with Sun employees at IEC. The cafeteria was packed with Sun employees who had some interesting questions that were countered with characteristic wit and modesty by the articulate Grandmaster. Sample question: "Have you ever lost a game of chess to a family member?" Anand: "Yes, when we were at Shimla in 1982, I did lose to my mother in a friendly match. I was probably overconfident and well, I lost. <smiles> I haven't played too many games with family members ever since!" And I end this star-struck, teenybopper-ish blog with this one-liner from (arguably) the greatest living chess player: "We like to think" - Garry Kasparov, when asked why he and Anatoly Karpov so often got into time trouble.