Vishy Anand — World Chess Champion

The publication of the third edition of Vishy Anand: World Chess Champion by Vishy Anand and John Nunn is well-timed with the champ’s recent successful title defense. The victory over Gelfand may not have been by a large margin but at the end of the day Anand’s career record places him ahead of all of his contemporaries and on the short list of the greatest of World Champions among names like Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine, Fischer, Karpov and Kasparov. This might seem like a bold claim but for the last two decades Anand has been among the very elite in an ever more competitive arena. A strong claim can be made that he is the greatest rapid player of all time.

The second edition of Vishy Anand: World Chess Champion took his career up to game four of his World Championship match with Alexey Shirov in Teheran at the end of 2000 and offered the reader 57 carefully annotated games. The present work adds another 200 (!) pages and 30 more games ending with Anand-Kasimdzhanov, Tashkent 2011. As John Nunn explains in the introduction while Anand annotated the games for the first two editions, with Nunn checking the work, here the roles were reversed. That said this book reads well and the new material blends in seamlessly. The additional games are not the only new additions. A 16-page interview of Anand by Sean Marsh, and a detailed career record round out a first rate tribute to a popular and well-liked World Champion.

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