The Gukesh Effect on Indian Chess

THE FIDE CANDIDATES Tournament in chess is held to select the player who competes against the world champion. It is the toughest competition in the sport, short of the world championship itself. This time the lineup, as usual, had the greatest players of the era. There was Fabiano Caruana, who had already played for the world cham­pionship once, and even though he was finally defeated by Magnus Carlsen (still the best but he decided that he wouldn’t participate in the world chess championship anymore some years back), he had not lost a single game till the tie breaker. There was Hikaru Nakamura, the most popular chess streamer in the world who is known to be an extraordinary talent in all time formats. There was Ian Nepomniachtchi, who had won the last two Candidates Tournament, only to falter both times at the world championship, first to Carlsen and then to the current champion Ding Liren. There were a total of eight competitors and Dommaraju Gukesh wasn’t even among the favourites to win the event. But he did it almost seamlessly, leading the pack most of the times and, except for one defeat, finally managing to inch through by half a point. Gukesh’s victory, however, glossed over another remarkable element in the tournament this year—of the eight who competed, three were Indians. His performance was a resonance of India’s rise as a chess superpower.

To appreciate it, we need to take a look at his career. Gukesh is only 17 years old now, but he had started showing signs of being a chess prodigy when no more than a little boy. On the international chess federation FIDE’s website, there are ratings and typi­cally chess players fall between 1000 and 2800 in the classical long-form version of the game. Carlsen still has the highest ratings at 2830. When Gukesh was seven years old, his rating was somewhere around 1200. A year later, he was 1600. He was only nine when he crossed 2000, marking him out as a serious prospect. By the time he was 13, he had crossed 2500. And at present he is at 2743. He became an international master in 2018 and the very next year he became a grandmaster. He was just 12 then. These are not easy titles to get and the very competitive nature of chess demands that only those who start very young, before they are ten, and have extraordinary drive and talent, can become a grandmaster. Even by all the above factors, Gukesh was an overachiever. He was the second youngest player to become a grandmaster. Seventeen days earlier and he would have been the youngest.And now he is the youngest to win the Candi­dates Tournament.

It requires a lot of long-term planning and resources. Guke­sh’s father, for instance, had to give up his practice as a doctor to focus on his son’s career. However, what is also necessary is for the soil to be fertile for such ambitions to succeed and that is where the Indian chess story comes in. When Gukesh became the second youngest grandmaster, the title of the youngest was held by Sergey Karjakin. But in 2021 that was finally over­turned by another 12-year-old grandmaster and he too was an Indian, Abhimanyu Mishra. The Indian chess player most in the news last year was R Praggnanandhaa who had defeated Carlsen in a number of short format games. Praggnanand­haa, who became a grandmaster when he was 12 years and 10 months old, was one of the three Indians in the Candidates Tournament this time as well. India at present has 84 grandmas­ters. In 1987, it had none. And the next year, 1988, it had one, Viswanathan Anand, and he was more or less responsible for the chess revolu­tion that would eventually come to pass in the country.

Gukesh said he wouldn’t have been anywhere near where he was if it hadn’t been for Viswanathan Anand’s inspiration and training he received from the former world champion’s chess academy. Much of the big leap that saw the likes of Gukesh and R Praggnanandhaa has come in the last decade

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Anand’s is a story which is perhaps even more remarkable than that of Gukesh. When you have so many grandmasters, the odds favour one or the other eventually making it to the top. But Anand went on to become the World Champion after being India’s first grandmaster and that means he didn’t have any of the infrastructure or experience of seniors to bank on. For instance, if you want to be a world beater you need to be trained by the best in the world. If they didn’t exist in India, there would be the effort and finances required to go to them in an era when the Internet wasn’t available. Anand once remembered in a media article that he only took up formal coaching after he had qualified for the Candidates in 1990 and that he was lucky in that chess theory, largely driven by com­puters and databases, was yet to become a basic requirement to be a professional player. His rise up to be a grandmaster was self-driven but his becoming the World Champion changed generations to come. He became a role model for many to take up chess and then combined with the prosperity that Indians were witnessing post liberalisation, many of these players who rose to the professional level, began to start coaching youngsters and the circle kept growing. That is why Garry Kasparov, one of the greatest of all times, posted on X after Gukesh’s victory, “Congratulations! The Indian earth­quake in Toronto is the culmination of the shifting tectonic plates in the chess world as the 17 year old Gukesh D will face the Chinese champion Ding Liren for the highest title. The “children” of Vishy Anand are on the loose!’ Gukesh himself said, in a press conference after the victory, that he wouldn’t have been anywhere near where he was if it hadn’t been for Anand’s inspiration and the training he received from the for­mer world champion’s chess academy. Much of the big leap that saw the likes of Gukesh and Praggnanandhaa came in the last decade. We now have a bevy of chess superstars and that only means more youngsters flocking to take up the game.

What makes Gukesh’s victory enticing for India is that he has a real chance of winning the world championship. If Carlsen would still be playing then the scales would be unbalanced, because many still consider him unbeatable in a world championship. But Gukesh faces Ding Liren, who even though highly rated, is beatable. The world chess champion­ship will be played later this year and it will be a gruelling format of 14 games. Both candidates will spend months holed up with a team of grandmasters thinking of their moves and that of their opponent’s. It is an exhausting process, which contributed to Carlsen deciding to not play any longer even though he was on top and was expected to win. Liren is 31 years old and has experience on his side. But so did almost all of Gukesh’s competitors in the Candidates Tournament. Even Carlsen had said he couldn’t imagine Gukesh winning the event. But then his opinion changed and by the final match Carlsen was saying that Gukesh was stronger than any of them had thought.

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Madhavankutty Pillai

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