February's Featured Grand Master
Viswanathan ("Vishy") Anand
"Viswanathan Anand, born 11 December 1969) is an Indian chess Grandmaster and the current World Chess Champion.
"Vishy" Anand as he is sometimes called by his friends, was born on 11 December 1969 in Mayiladuthurai, a small town in Tamil Nadu, India in a Tamil Iyer (South Indian Brahmin) family.
Shortly thereafter, his family moved to Chennai, erstwhile Madras, where he grew up. His father, Viswanathan Iyer, is a retired General Manager of Southern Railways, and his mother Susheela, housewife and chess/film/club aficionado and an influential socialite.
He has an elder brother, Shivakumar who is a manager at Crompton Greaves in India and an elder sister Anuradha who is a teacher at the University of Michigan. Anand is 11 years younger than his sister and 13 years younger than his brother.
He was taught to play chess by his mother. He described his start in chess in a conversation with Susan Polgar:
"I started when I was six. My mother taught me how to play. In fact, my mother used to do a lot for my chess. I joined the club in India and we moved to the Philippines for a year. And there they had a TV program that was on in the afternoon, one to two or something like that, when I was in school. So she would write down all the games that they showed and the puzzles, and in the evening we solved them together.
Of course my mother and her family used to play some chess, and she used to play with her younger brother, so she had some background in chess, but she never went to a club or anything like that.
So we solved all these puzzles and sent in our answers together. And they gave the prize of a book to the winner. And over the course of many months, I won so many prizes. At one point they just said take all the books you want, but don't send in any more entries."
Anand did his schooling in Don Bosco, Egmore, Chennai and holds a degree in commerce from Loyola College, Chennai. His hobbies are reading, swimming, and listening to music. He is married to Aruna Anand and lives in Collado Mediano in Spain.
Anand has been viewed as an unassuming, benevolent person with a reputation of refraining from political and psychological ploys as much as possible in order to focus solely on the chessboard.
This has made him a well-liked figure throughout the chess world for two decades, evidenced by the fact that Garry Kasparov, Vladimir Kramnik and Magnus Carlsen, all rivals for the World Championship throughout Anand's career, each aided him in preparing for the World Chess Championship 2010.
To read the rest of Web Chess Mercantile's Featured Grandmaster, please click and enjoy:)
To Your Chess Playing Success
Terry Ritschard
602-510-2830
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