Anand vs Topalov 2010: An Amateur’s View of the World Chess Championship Final

Every time a world chess championship concludes, we see a flurry of books and web pages with annotations, computer analysis and background information. Most of them are written by grandmasters and very strong players. Some contain detailed analysis and some have only superficial comments.

While in-depth reports from grandmasters who attended the championship in person (like Raymond Keene’s book on Karpov–Korchnoi and Karpov–Kasparov matches) are valuable with anecdotes, psychological notes and insider information, I always felt that a grandmaster is an overkill to annotate world championship games. Even an amateur player, with sufficient theoretical knowledge and patience, can analyze and annotate a grandmaster game. That is the motivation behind this book.

In 2008, I published a Malayalam blog post with a brief analysis of the Anand–Kramnik match. While the 2010 match was in progress, I had discussed the games with a few of my friends using Google buzz. Some people found my analysis good and suggested to compile that effort as book. This is the result of that work.

Even though I was never better than a state-level player in India and class A level (USCF rating 1800-2000) in the United states, I believe my 18 years of over-the-board tournament experience and 7 years of correspondence chess experience make me qualified to understand the games between Anand and Topalov in the world championship match 2010.

I hope this book will be useful to chess lovers. Please let me know your comments about this book.