MASTER SARIN, THE GRANDMASTER
AT JUST 15, NIHAL SARIN HAS BECOME THE CHESS PLAYER TO BEAT
Avideo uploaded by ChessBase India shows Nihal Sarin, then 11, take on a chess puzzle. He runs through the possibilities and in a flash, rattles away the answer, complex and precise. There was no chess board on hand; Nihal had worked it out in his head.
Now 15, Nihal is the third youngest in the world and the youngest Indian to have crossed the Elo 2600 rating points on the Fédération Internationale des Échecs (FIDE) rating list. In November last year, he played out a draw against India’s No. 1 and former World Champion, Viswanathan Anand, at the Tata Steel Rapid Chess tournament in Kolkata. It hadn’t quite gone as per plan, he admits. “I wanted to fight and play a full game and try and maybe even win. The advantage came after the middle game when he began to make slightly inaccurate moves. But I failed to make the most of it and then he just defended very well,” Nihal says.
Though reverential while sitting across the legend, Nihal started picking Anand’s brains backstage the minute it was over. It’s what makes Nihal tick—
a relentless hunger to learn ever since that first game against his grandfather at their home in Kottayam.
One of his first coaches, Nirmal E.P., then state champion, first met him at his school in 2012. “He was quick and showed the facial expressions of a genius,” Nirmal recalls. He rates the gold medal at Durban, South Africa, in 2014, when he became the U-10 world champion, as the win that gave him his break. By then he had earned the reputation of “the boy who never sits”. Nihal says, “I calculate better when or after I take a walk. Maybe it scares my opponent a bit,” Nihal says.
Over time, those emotions have sobered up, though the work rate has only gotten more efficient. A sign of it came at the World Blitz Championship last year, where he finished ahead of experienced players such as Anand, Shakhriyar Mamedyarov and Boris Gelfand.
“He is a guy who will keep knocking until the door opens,” says Priyadarshan Banjan, an integral member of Nihal’s team. “He may be talking to you, eating, or playing badminton, but at the back of his mind, chess is still running. He knows that to win more he must take risks, but he’s a shrewd guy.”
That said, there’s just one opponent that Nihal has a tough time dealing with even today—his younger sister, Neha. “Because she never loses—the pieces just vanish,” Nihal says.
Whether he is talking, eating or playing badminton, NIHAL SARIN always has chess at the back of his mind —Shail Desai