Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Check, mate!

It was an interesting experience to follow the chess world championship match that got over today at Moscow, with Vishy Anand of India being crowned the World Champion for the fifth time.

The professional chess is - well - difficult. First of all, I got lost (and amazed at) by extensive usage of chess-notation by the commentators. They seemed to remember the game move-by-move, just like a cricket scorer would remember statistics game-by-game. It was overwhelming, to say the least.

Here, at work, there was a large interest (because an Israeli was the challenger). At one of our weekly volleyball games, my friend teased me (Gelfand had just won a game to take lead in the 12-match series) about Israeli superiority. I simply had to offer a (Slav?) defense 'well, it's just a tactic to catch Boris unawares in the next match." And voila, Anand won the next game in mere 17 moves. "17 moves" was my subject in the follow-up email to my dear friend!

(I think) the tie-breaker games lived up to expectation. I was following game-2 (which Anand won). It was quite exciting to just see the moves and try my guess-work at what would be the next.

It was a complex situation: An Indian, Maharashtrian at that, working in Israel, following world championship match being played at Moscow between another Indian (Tamil) and an Israeli (originally born in Russia).

Yes, complex, but thoroughly enjoyable. Just as the tie-break games turned out to be.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I also followed that match and thought that you should be happy for Anand victory :)