Veni,vidi,vishy:Part III

1983

By this time the young boys from Madras had built a steady reputation for themselves. When the National Team Championship was held in Mumbai in May 1983, their group, the Madras Colts participated in full strength. The team comprised of teenagers, V.Anand, Ashok Aaron,Paul Arokiaraj and T.S.Ravi. In their debut performance they did well occupying the 7^th place in the final standings among 23 teams. Anand scored 3.5 points from 4 games to secure the First Board Prize and a direct entry to into the National ‘B’ Championship that began 3 days later in Ahmedabad.  He beat Manuel Aaron again. Later Aaron was to say that Anand had a lost position in both the games and came back to win with typical resourcefulness.

The National ‘B’ Championship was a 15-round Swiss with 156 players(!) competing for 14 qualifying places to the National ‘A’ Championship. The event was won by Arun Vaidya on a superior median tie- break over 5 others with 10.5 points. Anand shared 7th-14^th place with other talented youngsters like N.K.Mishra, T.N. Parameshwaran and Mitrakanth, scoring 10 points each.The 13-year-old wonder kid had now earned a berth in National ‘A’ Championship.

What he needed now was more experience in first class events. Soon an opportunity presented itself with a new competition, Mariammal-Mahalingam Rating Tournament commemorating the 60^th birthday of Mr. N. Mahalingam, the big patron of chess in Tamil Nadu. This was a strong field with most of the stalwarts from South India participating. Raja Ravisekhar came first with 10 points of 13, followed by Mitrakanth, T.N.Parameshwaran and M.J.Ismail. Anand was 5^th with 7 points. Apparently, he took too many risks, losing to Ravisekhar, Mitrakanth,Ganesan  and Murugan. It speaks for the strength of the tournament that experienced players like K.V.Shantharam and N.R.Anilkumar ended up in the lower half of the table.

The tournament was not without entertainment for chess fans. In one of the rounds S.Ganesan offered his queen to K.Murugan hoping to recapture his opponent’s queen with a knight fork. He did not realize that his knight would be pinned when the queen was captured.Murugan thought and thought while restive spectators broke the cordon to see whether he would wake up to the fact he could win a whole queen for nothing. But Murugan did not see it, moved his queen and resigned on the next move!

Anand followed up his performance in this event with a resounding success in the 4^th Indian Bank Open Tournament. In a 10-round Swiss for 116 players he lost to Arun Vaidya, drew with IM Ravisekhar and won the remaining 8 games. He took the first prize with a phenomenal score of 8.5 points out of 10, ahead of Ravisekhar and Arun Vaidya following half a point behind.

In October 1983 he participated in the National Subjunior Championship in Goa.He made a clean sweep, winning all his games with the score,9/9.

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