Few chess cognoscenti thought that Anand, at 25, had the experience to topple Kasparov, 32, who was the youngest world champion ever when he won the crown at age 22. Yet when the maximum 20-game match ($1 million to the winner, $500,000 to the loser) hit the halfway point last week, the two players were deadlocked. For a while the match, staged on the 107th floor of New York City's World Trade Center, looked like a snooze—the first eight games were cautiously played draws. Then Anand broke through with a win. "You catch a tiger by the whiskers, next day he's going to be ferocious," he predicted. Sure enough, Kasparov fought back to take the next game.
But then, Anand knows about tigers. Now living in Spain, he was reared in Madras, India, where he learned chess from his mother, Susila, at 6. He became a grandmaster at 17 but has turned out far less obsessed than, say, Bobby Fischer. "He-likes science fiction, pop music, and he loves the Terminator movies," says American grandmaster Patrick Wolff, 27, one of Anand's friends.
Meanwhile, there's a match to finish. "Anand may not win," says Maurice Ashley, an international master from Brooklyn who is commentating for ESPN, "but expect him to be around for the next one and the one after that."
After all, even King Kong couldn't hang on forever.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
