IF AN INDIAN UNDER 16 IS THE BEST IN THEIR AGE GROUP, YOU CAN BE REASONABLY SURE THAT KID IS IN THE TOP THREE WORLDWIDE
Quietly, move by move, India ha been strengthening its positio in world chess. Viswanathan Anand earne India’s first Grand Master (GM title back in 1988. Today, we have 47 GMs – about half of whom have earned their titles in the last five years. Three Indians hold the unofficial Super Grand Master title – they’ve each crossed 2700 points, putting them in the elite league.
But Frederic Friedel, the man behind the database firm ChessBase and a widel respected authority on the game, has pre dicted that India will dominate chess ove the next decade. He estimates that India will have as many as 40 players in the top 100. We currently have seven.
What might cause this takeover? Players who are yet to break on to the battlefield. At the junior level, players under 20 have been crushing the competition. When they start playing as adults, they’re set to change the face of Indian chess.
Indians traditionally play risktaking, hitandrun games, like the Armenians, rather than the slow, strategic Russians. But young India is learning from both India and Russia because we now have the exposure and data.
RB Ramesh, who became India’s 10th Grand Master in 2003, has had a ringside view of the change. His Chennai-based academy, Chess Gurukul, has coached kids aged 5 and up since 2008. Many have won international titles in their age range.
Even five years ago, Indian kids would manage barely five of 22 medals. “Now, they take almost half the medals in Junior categories,” he says. “In the Under 8, we have six medals. In the Under 10, we have six more. In the 2015 World Championship, India won five Golds – Russia took two medals overall. If an Indian under 16 is the best in their age group at chess, you can be reasonably sure that kid is in the top three worldwide. We are now the benchmark.”
Last year, a Chess Gurukul student became the world’s youngest International Master (IM). R Praggnanagdhaa broke the 27-year record of Hungarian Judit Polgar, possibly the world’s greatest woman player. She was 11 when she became IM. Praggnanagdhaa was 10.
“When the Indian team shows up at tournaments in matching jerseys, and competitors know they’re playing an Indian that day, they get nervous,” says Balaji Guttula, chief coach at the South Mumbai Chess Academy.
The SMCA started off in 1997, introducing chess as a casual game for kids. Talented players would play competitively and Guttula’s brother Nagesh, who owns the academy, would have to warn parents about committing time and money towards international matches.
“Today we don’t have to explain this,” Balaji Guttula says. “Nine out of 10 parents are serious about their kid achieving something at a young age, and are willing to invest in it.” The academy’s 35 coaches train 500 schoolkids in India and abroad.
In India, most chess stars stumbled on to the game. Pune’s Mrunalini Kunte-Aurangabadkar, 44 and Woman International Master, was 11 when a coach noticed her play and began training her. When she lost a match and refused to go back, the Kuntes sent her eight-year-old cricket-loving brother, Abhijit, along for support. Abhijit is now GM and both siblings coach chess.
Balaji picked up the game from friends. R Vaishali, Praggnanagdhaa’s 16-year-old sister, was dispatched to chess classes at age 3 to break her addiction to cartoons. RB Ramesh was 12, and had hurt himself playing cricket when his father sought a safer alternative. “It was the year Anand became GM, so chess was an easy choice.”
Ramesh recalls it being a simpler time. “There was a lack of everything – access to books, information, training, opportunities and therefore competition,” he says. “A reasonably smart person working reasonably hard could get to the top.”
Kunte-Aurangabadkar agrees: “We had no coaches or books or websites. Abhijit was the country’s fourth GM in 2000, but there was no GM to coach him.”
Ramesh says Indians have traditionally played risk-taking, hit-and-run games, like the Armenians, rather than the slow, strategic Russians. “But young India is learning from both India and Russia because we now have the exposure.” The greatest threat to India’s budding chess talent isn’t a foreign competitor or a playing style – it is India itself. By age 16, half of our promising players simply drop out, taking with them their rankings, medals and India’s hopes.
Balaji recalls coaching Shiven Khosla, who became IM at 13 and was top-ranked in Asia. “He took a break for his Class 10 exams. He never came back.”
Players fizzle out for several reasons. Kunte finds that urban kids get distracted by other activities while rural players struggle to find good coaches. Ramesh says some kids simply feel too entitled to continue the struggle; others burn out.
But by 16, all players realise that there will be fewer quality tournaments in India. Local matches will feature the same players and will be organised badly. “We once played two days of a state-level Under-13 tournament in a parking lot,” says Kunte.
To score a higher rating, players must go to Europe, where tournaments are held every week. Many parents, who have already been travelling to domestic and foreign tournaments every month with their kids by this point, decide to quit.
Rameshbabu, the father of Vaishali and Praggnanagdhaa, is a bank manager but has a physical condition that makes travel difficult – so their mother, N Nagalakshmi, a housewife, accompanies each kid on trips. “We didn’t want Praggnanagdhaa to join chess too because of the high cost,” he says. “If both the kids have tournaments at the same time, it’s impossible for us.”
For now, India has more young achievers than traditionally well-performing nations like Russia. But the Chinese identify talent early and invest in it better. Their players get better faster.
Sports psychologist Janki Rajapurkar, who counsels chess players, says longterm success comes when kids are taught to enjoy playing the game, rather than winning it. “If you don’t like chess, the pressure won’t let you win,” she says.
Rameshbabu stresses that parents tune in to the psychology of their children to set goals. “They may not be in the mood to learn, or be pushed, or they may respond better to tone than instruction.”
We also need better coaches. Not just experienced players, but those who’ve played in the all-important foreign tournaments as older kids and are trained to bring out the best in another player.
The government must think long-term, Kunte believes. “Great Britain had just one Gold at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics,” he says. “But when they bid for the 2012 edition to be held in London they invested heavily in school sports initiatives. They finished third in 2012 and second in 2016. So you can see the lasting effect of their efforts.” fight over which move will be played.”
Chess now has LED boards that light up squares to offer hints to beginners. Smartboards work out the best moves to play against an evolving user. Coaches use Skype. Mobile apps like Follow Chess transmit top live games. Mobile Stockfish lets you analyse your positions and makes recommendations. You could even face-off a simulation of the world’s top chess player, Magnus Carlsen, on Play Magnus.
At the very top, where the best grandmasters battle as the world watches, chess pieces carry magnetic sensors that record every new location as the pieces are moved. As audiences “watch” the bout unfold live, dedicated servers track every move calculating the outcome for viewers in seconds, even as the players take time to work it out.
For some coaches, this is good news. Balaji Guttula, Nagesh’s brother and chief coach at the SMCA, says the data helps preparation for world championships. “We no longer coach kids for national matches but international ones,” he says. This means studying a decade’s worth of trends, examining possible openings, a competitor’s arc and weaknesses. “This sort of study is new to the way chess is being taught in the country. We are using the data well.”
RB Ramesh, Grand Master and coach to some of India’s rising stars, takes another view. “With the web, there’s too much information,” he says. “You can’t tell which data is good or bad for your needs.” Computers have been beating world champions since 1997, when the Deep Blue programme outplayed Garry Kasparov. But no computer has been able to solve chess (work out a win from every possible set of moves). And Nagesh says that playing against a machine alone will never improve your game.
A machine can, however, help you finish better, which explains the sharp rise in cheating cases, in which participants consult computers on their breaks.