Midnight in Sofia

Impressions on Game 1, Anand-Topalov world championship match, Sofia

A KO punch delivered even as the opening bell was thrumming. A stillborn struggle was the result of Veselin Topalov handing Viswanathan Anand a crushing blow in the opening itself.

Topalov, with white, opened with the queen pawn. Anand responded with a defence named after its pioneer, the Austrian master Ernst Grunfeld. Anand's choice echoed distantly through the halls of history. It was an Indian, Mahesh Chandra Bannerjee, who laid the roots of the Grunfeld defence by playing it at the Calcutta Chess Club as far back as 1855. However it was Grunfeld who popularized the opening in the 1920s.

Chess, like war is locked to geography; just as an army seeks to occupy the "commanding heights", chess players seek to control the centre of the board with their pawns and support it with their knights and bishops. The player who commands the centre can use it as a jumping point to attack the enemy, to impose his will on the ebb and flow of the contest.

This at least, was the theory propounded by the Classicists. Starting in the 1920s however, in line with the changes sweeping the world after the Great War, a new school of thought arose. Calling themselves the Hypermodernists they sought to inject fresh life into the way chess openings were played. Rejecting the idea of the race between both powers to occupy the centre that characterized openings till then, they instead chose to undermine the centre rather than occupy it. In their view, allowing the enemy to occupy the centre and then to target the centre with their pieces offered new avenues of play. Conceding the centre to White also means that play is razor-sharp. Black is walking the precipice, one false move and a plunge into the abyss is inevitable.

The game began in a flurry of moves, reflective of modern chess. Both players blitzed out their moves, no doubt prepared months in advance by their seconds and computers. Anand deviated first with a new move but Topalov continued to play at the same speed. Then came the catastrophe. Topalov's pieces, led by his knight and queen were menacing the black king. The first warning sign was Anand slowing down and taking time to think - a "tell" as poker players would put it - that all was not well. Anand was searching in the vast chambers of his memory, an immense library built move by move, book by book over the two decades that he has been a top level player. Searching in vain. Rejecting a bishop manouevre that commentators said was necessary, Anand finally moved his king from the firing line.

Topalov's response was as brutal as it was rapid. A Knight smashed into the fortress of pawns around the Black king. Anand attempted a desparate flight to safety but it was too late. The white pieces coralled his majesty in the centre of the board and with checkmate imminent Anand had to throw in the towel.

It took just one move to turn Anand from high priest of Mnemosyne to a sacrifice at her altar. But it is a myth that top grandmasters are infallible. Anand in an interview said, "It's funny, you may remember every single thing. But if you don't remember that you remember that is also a problem. There are quite a lot of players who remember every single detail of their preparation but they are not sure that they remember. And the effect is the same as not remembering."

Event investigators investigating a plane crash talk about the "accident chain" that led to that event - a cascading sequence of bad judgement, bad circumstances and bad luck that results in disaster. It is a chain because break a link anywhere down the line and the accident wouldn't have happened. Investigators begin by working backwards from the terminal event, by reconstructing the chain of consequences.

Anand by choosing such a sharp line and then mixing up the moves may be likened to a jetliner pilot desperately searching for a narrow runway in a wilderness. In heavy fog. Without radar. And under anti-aircraft fire. It is no surpise that Anand's first game became a smouldering crater.

Of course, all this may just be ill-informed speculation. We have no way of knowing until information is received from the world champion's mind, the ultimate "black box".

Jaideep Unudurti is co-writing the Hyderabad Graphic Novel (http://hgnp.wordpress.com/)