Anand and his PC are virtually inseparable and he is loaded with over a million games on the hard disk as well as Cd Roms, replete with moves, nuances et al. "All the boards are wired with censors nowadays and each move gets recorded automatically. These files are stored in PGM, a standardised text format for chess games portable game notations. In this form, the games circulate on the Net, so anybody can download them. In fact, nobody types out any moves anymore," says the grandmaster.

Imagine printing out 1 million games on the paper and referring to them as compared to the comfort of storing them on the hard disk of your PC! Anand says he uses IT practically all the time. "These days when I am training, I am just notusing the board. I surf the Net for a few hours each day."According to Anand, "The computer can outsmart a human mind any day in terms of calculations and speed, but the strategy is one area where a machine can never ever be one up on man."

Anand uses analysis engines and corresponds a lot with his chess friends on the Net. Anand feels the Net is the best possible way to popularise chess among the children and other enthusiasts in India. "Before the Net happened, you had only the spectators, now sky is the limit," Anand says. The various websites of popular tournaments routinely record an average of 25,000 hits a day and most have various levels for different categories of users. The clash like the Deep Blue versus Gary Kasparov registered up to 6 million hits a day.