The Indian chess Grandmaster Viswanathan "Vishy" Anand was born on the 11st December in 1969. His Elo-rating is 2770 (2016. April), his highest world rank is 1st (2007. April). He belonged to the top ten players in the world from 1991-2011. He was a World Chess Champion between 2000-2002 and 2007-2013.

In an interview, he commented on his early relationship with chess as the following: “I started when I was six. My mother taught me how to play. In fact, my mother used to do a lot for my chess. We moved to the Philippines shortly afterward. I joined a club in India and we moved to the Philippines for a year. And there they had a TV programme that was on in the afternoon, one to two or something like that, when I was in school. So she would write down all the games that they showed and the puzzles, and in the evening we solved them together. Of course my mother and her family used to play some chess and she used to play her younger brother so she had some background in chess but she never went to a club or anything like that. So we solved all these puzzles and sent in our answers together. And they gave the prize of a book to the winner. Over the course of many months, I won many prizes. At one point they just said take all the books you want but don't send in anymore entries.”

Anand first won the FIDE World Championship in 2000. He beat Alexei Shirov (3,5-0,5) and became the first Indian World Champion. He lost his title in 2002, when Ruslan Ponomaryov beat him. In 2007 September Anand became the World Champion again (this time the two types of championship titles were merged). He won the double round-robin tournament with a final score of 9 out of 14 points, a full point ahead of joint second-place finishers Vladimir Kramnik and Boris Gelfand.

He participated in seven chess Olympiads between 1984 and 2006. He got only one individual silver medal in 2004.

Fun facts:

He became the first undisputed Champion to win the title in a tournament, rather than in match play since Mikhail Botvinnik in 1948.