saffuna: Anand's complete description of this game:
<TRULY, I WAS IN A FIX. ON THE BOARD BEFORE ME, WAITING TO be unlocked, lay the variation over which I’d put myself and the team through the grind during my World Championship match against Gelfand a year ago. It hadn’t come into use then, but here it was now, ready to be played in the fourth round of the Wijk aan Zee tournament, 2013. The problem was I couldn’t remember anything about the work we’d done a year ago except one niggling detail.
I imagined my trainer, Nielsen, scowling in a corner of the hall. It was the last tournament in which Nielsen would be working with me, after having been a part of my team and indeed my family for close to a decade. He was to join Carlsen’s team shortly. Despite that, when I proposed the idea of working together for a final time for the Wijk aan Zee tournament, he had happily agreed. The understanding between us was that if Carlsen qualified for the World Championship against me that year, Nielsen would stay neutral and step away from any preparatory work for or against me.
Aronian, the defending champion of the annual competition, sat across me, listening to me breathe, waiting for my hand to push a piece. I had two choices: To back down and move somewhere else on the board, or press down the main line, trying to trace out the sketchy notes from a forgotten training session. Although I couldn’t draw up the exact positions I’d worked on, I knew that sticking to the main line was good for Black. It was like knowing about a treasure hidden in a forest and setting out to look for it with just a few snippets of information available – such as that it’s under a tree with three fruits hanging from its branches and the tree itself is not far from a waterbody. There could be two trees that meet the description, but after considering all the information available you have to refine your decision and make the best guess you can. Without those bits of information, the forest is like any other forest, and you wouldn’t want to waste your time poking around in it.
Similarly, in chess, in a scenario where you don’t know if there’s something useful buried in a position, prudence would suggest that you simply stick to what you know. At the board, I initially felt lost. The information I had from my team and our past work on the position was that the main line was good for Black, and yet it seemed contradictory to what I saw before me now. <All I could remember was one little nuance – that my knight had eventually got to d3. Nothing else.> I sat there, my brain turning into mulch, my mind screaming that there must be a better way and trying to work out the line.
The parallels between the game that had me flummoxed and a classic game that I had read about as a child – played in Łódž, Poland, between Gersz Rotlewi and Akiba Rubinstein – were manifest. It was the same knight whipping up the attack and the White king was being browbeaten by the bishop duo on the exact diagonals.
With no other cues to hang on to, I looked hard at the board, drilling deeper and deeper into my mind, going over the line again and again to make sure the positions matched the one thing I remembered, while I tried to mentally stencil out a plausible line before setting off on my wild scavenger hunt.
I remember thinking at one stage how worried Nielsen must be. Some part of him may have been shocked at my amnesiac behaviour at the board, while the other wondered what I was getting at. At the end of my prolonged musing – over a whole 30 minutes – the bishop sacrifice I offered up to gain the diagonal with Bc5 wiped the colour off Aronian’s face. I then abandoned my knight, offering it up to be taken by a pawn with Nde5. It cleared the path for my queen and Aronian went on to walk right into a mate. Every player goes on to create that one thing of absolute, peerless beauty. This one was mine; one of the finest games of my life. I’d managed to piece together the half-memory of a classic game, my own preparatory data in the area and trusted my intuition to stay persistent in the hope of crawling to the other end of the tunnel where I’d find light and vindication.>