Two months later, sitting in his RA Puram residence in Chennai, Anand recalls the minute details of his title preparation: "I was doing tactical exercises every evening, five puzzles. I also did certain endgames I was afraid of."

Vishy Anand has certainly thought long and hard, plotting his ascent to the top. Now, he is on another mission: to make chess-lovers of millions of Indian kids and teenagers. The first moves have already been made.

The great Cuban chess player, Jose Raul Capablanca once said: "I see only one move ahead, but it is always the correct one." Anand would gladly agree. His big dream beyond the board isn’t about churning out world champions by the dozens, but creating chess-lovers by the millions. The ‘Anand effect’ on Indian chess is visible.

Chennai-based chess writer Arvind Aaron sensed it in 2001. "Just a year after Anand’s first world title, all key tournaments had record entries," he says. Observers reckon that the current glittering achievements of Indian chess (including the world junior boys and junior girls titles) are a spinoff of Anand’s success. Simply put, without Anand’s meteoric rise, there would not have been any Indian chess worth the game.

When Anand started his career in the early-1980s, India had only one International Master and no Grandmasters. Today, there are thousands of FIDE (the world chess federation) rated players, dozens of International Masters and 18 Grandmasters, in the country, including the world’s youngest, Parimarjan Negi.

By the time Anand entered, the Soviet Union had dominated the chess world for nearly five decades. Think Australia’s dominance in cricket but spread out over 50 years. The Soviets could do this because they had a fantastic machinery dedicated to spotting talent, nurturing that talent and then pushing them to perform. The cornerstone of this system was a network of thousands of sports centres designed to identify talented children, who would later be trained by an army of coaches. The system worked.

Chess, unlike any other sport, is sustained by a vast base of theory. Any pretender to the throne needs to master these theories. Essentially consisting of key games and positions, these have to be learned at a formative stage by any player hoping to make it big.

Much like how we are the products of the DNA of thousands of our ancestors, each chess game played by great players forms an apex of a pyramid of millions of games played before. This, in turn, is the base for games that will be played in the future. Here, the Soviets had a massive advantage: the libraries of organisations such as the Central Chess club in Moscow alone had thousands of chess books and index cards of opening and endgame theories. The other component invaluable for the growth of any player is constant practice. Here too, the Soviets had millions of players at every level, offering practice partners at every rung of the chess ladder.

Vishy was up against this well-oiled machine when he burst onto the scene,  becoming a Grandmaster in 1988. His situation was not unlike another outsider two decades earlier: Bobby Fischer. Anand didn’t have Fischer’s eccentricities, neither was he funded by a US in the grips of a Cold War. Instead, he adopted a classic asymmetric strategy, innovatively using the then ongoing IT revolution to nullify the edge of the Soviets.

It is telling that Anand was the second player, after Garry Kasparov, to take to using personal computers and chess software. As a result, he could carry the sum of the vast Soviet libraries in his hard-drive. For practice partners, he had chess ‘engines’—powerful pieces of code that could calculate millions of positions per second.

Thanks to such tools, even very early on in the world scene, Anand proved he could overcome the mighty Soviets. During his tenth standard, he became an International Master, and in the twelfth, at the age of 18, he became India’s first Grandmaster. "At key moments like my tenth and twelfth standards, when I could have hesitated about a career in chess, I had very good results," he says. He didn’t hesitate. Chess was his calling. "When I became a Grandmaster, life stabilised," says Anand. "Suddenly, I was invited to tournaments, given a fee to play, a hotel room to stay and things like that."

“If 10 million people somehow come into contact with the game and just learn the rules, one day, even if they have not taken chess seriously, they may want to watch it”

Anand’s success over the years has not only spawned wannabe Anands, but also got corporate India interested. Even those having no clue about chess will sit up and take notice when an Indian earns Rs 4.7 crore, winning the world championship.

Companies eyeing a slice of India’s interest in chess now range from the Tatas to realty company Parsvnath. NIIT, India Cements, Ramco Group, Sakthi Sugars, Sun Group, and public sector oil companies are also active sponsors of chess tournaments. "Anand is the fuel for more money coming into chess," says Aaron. "More money means more people."

The 39-year-old Anand has passed the mid-point on his career graph. One fear is that the chess bubble will pop once he retires from the game. That could put Indian chess back years to a situation where people just wait for another chess superstar to pop up out of nowhere.

Others like Frederic Friedel, founder of ChessBase, the world’s largest chess software company, believe that Anand’s name is immensely durable. Distinguishing Anand from Fischer, who took the West by storm after his win over Russian Boris Spassky, Friedel says: "Fischer electrified the world and especially the US after winning the world championship. But after that, he became weird and put a lot of people off, especially many Americans." He goes on to say: "Figures like Anand are like legendary heroes, and a lot of kids will play for many decades to come because of their great Indian chess hero."

Anand, however, is well aware of what happened to the game in the Philippines after the best years of its Grandmaster Eugenio Torre, whose defeat of the then world champion Anatoly Karpov is legendary. Once icons fade, the game suffers too.

"If Fernando Alonso were to go, the craze for Formula 1 in Spain wouldn’t be there," says Anand, who spends a good part of the year in Collado Mediano, Spain. Maybe, that is why he wants to leverage his success now, by involving millions of children in India.

The Indian Grandmaster has been closely involved with NIIT’s Mind Champion Academy to popularise the game. The academy has 6,500 chess clubs operating in schools across the country, targeting kids in the 7-17 age group. There are about 50 students per club. "They are given the infrastructure and atmosphere, so that if they want to play, they can play," says Anand. A ladder of chess tournaments from the school to national level is provided through the annual Chess Masters tournament for the club students. Interestingly, the entire tournament is played over the Internet, enabling even students in far-flung and remote areas to compete. From the zonal level onwards, the winners will also get a chance to play against Anand himself.

It was a simple conversation that gave birth to the Mind Champion Academy. Recounts Anand: "We realised that chess-playing kids, as many studies showed, performed better academically. This realisation kick-started the whole idea," he says .

Traditionally, such massive programmes were held to be firmly in the domain of the state. NIIT’s initiative is, however, overturning the state-funded paradigm. Says Anand: "Nowadays, you can’t really go asking the government to do everything for you. Private companies will have to be a big part of it. I know a lot of companies where if a few employees are playing chess, they will allow them to form a chess club. There are many software companies in India that will do it. So, slowly, we are attaining a critical mass. Definitely, we are not anywhere near cricket, but the situation has improved."

Anand also talks about expanding chess beyond the traditional centres in India. Chess was always big in Tamil Nadu and the South. It had a foothold in Bengal and Maharasthra as well. "The Northeast and the North, generally, had no real chess at all. "Now, we are actually teaching chess in several areas where chess never had any presence. And that is also very exciting," says Anand.

"If 10 million people have somehow come into contact with the game at some stage and just learnt the rules, then you know one day, even if they have not taken chess seriously, they may want to watch it," he says. Creating a potential audience is important because it means building a base that can sustain a spectator sport.

Unlike cricket, football or tennis, chess isn’t still a spectator sport. So, advertising revenues have eluded chess; and possibly a healthier career for many chess aspirants. "The biggest hurdle for chess as a spectator sport is that people don’t know the rules," Anand points out.

Time is another barrier, as chess matches can go on for a couple of hours. Aaron says: "If time controls can be reduced, it would boost the chances of chess as a spectator sport." Anand too knows it: "In chess, thinking from the spectator’s point of view, there’s an initial hurdle that you can’t even see an object moving." Can the world convince the Russians, who are said to be holding on to the time-control traditions, to let go? Maybe, Anand can help.

In chess, the ‘king walk’ is the most difficult of manoeuvres—marching one’s king deep into enemy territory and forcing checkmate. Through his entire career, Vishy Anand has been doing just that.