UNDISPUTED:

In the Major League of Chess, Next Year Comes So Soon (DYLAN LOEB McCLAIN, 10/03/07, NY Times)

[Viswanathan Anand] is the first Asian to be the undisputed champion and only the second player from outside Eastern Europe in the last 60 years. (The other was the American Bobby Fischer, who held the title from 1972 to 1975.) [...]

Mr. Anand’s strength has always been his speed and computational ability. He quickly sees deeply into positions, rarely spending much time on his moves or using anywhere near his allotted time for a game. For many years, he has widely been acknowledged to be the best rapid chess player in the world.

Mr. Anand, 37, took a long time to win the championship. He broke into the elite in 1991 by winning a strong tournament that included Garry Kasparov, then the world champion, and the former champion Anatoly Karpov.

Since then he has won all the top tournaments at least once, but he has always struggled to win matches. In a match, the historical format for determining a champion, two players face each other repeatedly, while in a tournament, many face one another just once or twice.

Some observers and fellow competitors have ascribed Mr. Anand’s struggles in matches to nerves. In 1995 he lost an 18-game match at the top of the World Trade Center to Mr. Kasparov. In 1998, he won a tournament to select a challenger to Mr. Karpov for the World Chess Federation championship; they played to a tie in a six-game match, but Mr. Karpov prevailed in a playoff.

Technically, Mr. Anand’s victory in Mexico City is his second world title. In 2000, he won the federation’s championship tournament held in Tehran and New Delhi. But at the time, the title was split and many people recognized Mr. Kramnik, the Russian, as the legitimate champion, a situation that Mr. Anand acknowledged tainted his victory.