There is an amazing interview with Anand conducted on Playchess. Finally Anand revealed who is on his team. A big surprise is the number of top players who worked with him in some way. Read this - Magnus Carlsen, Garry Kasparov and Vladimir Kramnik! Strangely, according to Anand, they are the ones who offered their help not the other way round.
This might seem very strange, Kasparov has retired from active play but the other two will continue to be over the board rivals with Anand for some time in the future and might even be challenging for the world title in 2012.
It is hard to imagine any of these three doing the same for anyone else.
I believe this is a testament to Anand himself. I had the opportunity to meet him over the board way before he became a super grandmaster. It is very hard not to like the man. After smashing my position and mating my king, he was humble and polite in the post-mortem. No ego at all, just a simple boy who happen to be a genius at chess.
He is really Mr. Nice Guy and people respect not just his chess but his character and the way he conducts himself. He is like an ideal role model and I do not mean from a chess point of view. One other reason may be that none of them wants to see Topalov win!
The first part of the interview is reproduced on Chessbase here
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2 comments:
Jimmy,
Though I support your 1st reason at 40%, I strongly support the 2nd at 60%
I believe most people dislike his second / manager Dainalov immensely, starting from the toilet-gate (in Topalov's match with Kramnik).. though it was necessary to rock your opponent's psychology, toilet-gate was the work of an idiot/psycho!
Yes, you are probably right of course. Actually I pity Topalov. I believe he is a decent guy and not from the same mold as Dainalov. It will be good for his PR to sack his manager. Unfortunately his fortune is tied together with Dainalov.
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