Anish Giri - Master class ( ProChess Diaries)

 I came to know of Anish Giri's master class in ProChess not so long ago, and without second thoughts joined it! I remember first meeting Anish as a young prodigy completing his second Gm norm( if i remember correctly) at the Groningen Open 2008-2009. The next time I met him it was already in the Qatar Masters where he was one of the elite and was almost winning the event with a 6/6 start. His journey from a child prodigy to one of the very best has been filled with excitement for chess lovers. Besides his achievements, he has always maintained a friendly and pleasant demeanor and that perhaps made him a crowd puller always. 

So, coming back to the master class lesson, he started off the session with his usual pleasant humour and made everyone comfortable by letting everyone know that he  knows all the students of the class ! To warm up he shared a few positions from a recent chess.com Blitz event, which would usually be blasphemy in Soviet times, but he clearly elaborated on why he did this. People (especially the elite group students) would have seen all top level games and it would be hard to quiz them there, so he chose his online Blitz game- fair enough logic!

This is a position from his game( as Black ) against Sarana after White's 34th move. He asked us to think up and come up with our ideas. Having to specifically think about this position most of us came up with 34...Ree5! 35.Be5 Ne5+ 36.Kg3 Bh6 37.Rf1 Nd3 etc. However keeping in mind that this is a blitz game and both sides were probably playing this position in less than a minute, one has to understand how complex the position actually is and Anish had chosen 34... Ne5 which is perhaps the most natural option.

Let me offer you one more position after a few more moves.

This is the position after White's 38th move and we were asked what we would choose here. I came up with 38...Rf3+ 39. Rf3 gxf3 followed by ...f2 and Anish remarked that this is right and is indeed what he chose. The game went 39.Kg2 by the way. However Abhimanyu Mishra came up with 38...Rb8 and at the end of his line reached a position like this 

I have seen positions with 2 Rook pawns and a Vancura draw in Dvoretsky's endgame manual, but as usually happens, was not sure of the result, especially so if asked at gunpoint with limited time! The advanced King and back rank cut off were enough to create doubts. Anish too was not sure, but later as it turned out to be a draw complemented Abhimanyu on his immaculate knowledge of precise endgames! (Abhimanyu Mishra is the youngest Grandmaster and a child prodigy)

There were several other very interesting moments from Anish's blitz game and we lost track of time when we were looking into the intricacies of it.

Later on Anish came to the main topic of his lecture( Yes all this was merely a warmup!!) which were his games versus Vishy Anand. Once again excuse me for a slight digression, I have seen Anish converse in Russian with Kramnik and in fluent English with Vishy and also Dutch with his countrymen. Genetically he has the ideal make up of Russian and Nepali and maybe going further back Indian too! And ideally for a promising junior and now a permanent elite player he is living in Europe where his chess skills have been honed to perfection. Despite all this many people including myself consider him to stylistically similar to our own legend Vishy Anand. So, when he announced the topic of the lecture during the session, it was quite intriguing as an observer for me. He narrated various meetings with Vishy right from his childhood until some very recent games too. He chose and discussed various games of theirs starting from 2011 until 2020 and the games included Classical, Rapid and Blitz too! Let me share with you a few impressions of these

This was from his very first game versus World Champion Anand from Tata Steel 2011 where he has introduced 12...c5 as a novelty in this position. The lecture also contained an incredibly quick review of the evolution of various lines in a particular opening position that he was discussing. For example in this opening Anish rattled out various move order tricks and older games like Carlsen-Karjakin 2009 which changed the direction of how the top players approached a certain line and how they changed with time and the reasons behind the same! This should be very useful for upcoming talents on how a broad erudition can be a formidable weapon in the hands of a top player.

This is a position from the same game after move 20. This was around the time that Black started turning over the tables a little bit and changing the trend of how the game proceeded. In the end this was ended in a hard fought draw after some brilliant defense by Vishy, but as Anish pointed out, one where he missed a complex path to win at the very end in a Rook Endgame.

This was a position from Anish's White game against Vishy from Tata Steel 2013. He mentioned that he learnt that with the Knight on e6 there is not much of a Kingside attack even if White gets his Knight to f5 and also his Rooks and pieces on the Kingside might turn out to be offside. Later the game ended in a draw. But this was a very instructive position from my viewpoint where two great players teach how they perceive a position and hint at important factors which can help students nurture their own thoughts in their quest for improvement.

Next up this position was from Anish's excellent victory from their 2015 Bilbao encounter. Witnessing the few games that were shown in this lecture, I could not help but thinking of the ideological battles like in Steinitz/Chigorin times were each player upholds a certain preferred way to play. Vishy clearly loves Knights and Anish as he admitted loves the pair of Bishops. When great players fight it out with different styles and preferences, the result is just a treat for the students of the game!

Anish also looked at his loss versus Vishy from Shamkir 2019. This is an instructive moment after Black's 20th move. I had seen this game earlier and had my own impressions of it and of course knew the move, but I thoroughly enjoyed the positional ideas of Anish, who in his inimitable way explained how a position which was more pleasant for Black could end up being a strategically lost one in a course of just a few careless moves. White continued with 21.Bc7! and went on to win in an instructive fashion, but like I said earlier, more than a move, it is important to understand the key ideas in a position and how they evolve.

Finally a position from their Blitz game from 2021 Zagreb. Anish is White and solve for this position for a White victory. ( Hint:- There are 2 solutions)