Vladimir Kramnik has been one of the greatest chess players in the world. Having achieved the Grandmaster norms in 1992, he became the youngest world number one in January 1996 and held the record for 14 years until Magnus Carlsen took the spot in January 2010.
Kramnik was also hailed for helping unify the chess world when he faced Veselin Topalov in the World Chess Championship 2006. He defeated Topalov to become the undisputed World Champion.
After announcing his professional retirement in January 2019, he shifted his focus to development projects particularly related to chess education for children.
International Master and Woman Grandmaster Tania Sachdev recently got Kramnik into an exclusive chat to ask him about his career and his mental approach to the game for an episode of the Mind Behind series.
The Mind Behind is a cross-discipline series about the lives and careers of professionals across multiple streams. The series developed by Red Bull Media House features actors, chefs, comedians, dancers, filmmakers, musicians, sports personalities, and many others, as part of exclusive one-on-one interviews.
Kramnik beat chess legend Garry Kasparov in 2000 to become the Classical World Champion. In 2006, he beat Veselin Topalov to become the undisputed World Champion. He boasts three gold medals and three individual medals at Chess Olympiads. He is also tied-eight with Viswanathan Anand for all-time best chess ratings at 2817.
Yet, when he looks back at his successful career, he thinks it was better than he expected because he did not think he had the talent to be the best. Kramnik says that he would have been happy being an average Grandmaster and that his world champion achievement was beyond expectations.
While Kramnik has been part of some interesting world championship matches against the likes of Garry Kasparov, Peter Leko, Veselin Topalov, and Viswanathan Anand, he most enjoyed watching Kasparov versus Anatoly Karpov in 1984. Kramnik was 12 years old when this match was started and intently studying to become a professional chess player. The world championship match started in 1984 as a first-to-six-wins format but was abandoned without result.
It was restarted as a best-of-24 match in 1985 and eventually won by Kasparov. Kramnik says he remembers the first match of 1984 as his favorite because he traveled to Moscow to watch it in the Hall of Columns — the first time he traveled out of his region — and was very impressed by the grandeur of the occasion. It steeled his resolve to become a professional chess player.
