Teen champion rides India’s chess boom to global supremacy

Eighteen-year-old Dommaraju Gukesh has become the world’s youngest chess champion after a tense four-hour battle, cementing India’s status as a growing powerhouse in the competitive sport once dominated by Russia.

Gukesh dethroned Ding Liren of China, in a 14 -game tussle that culminated in a catastrophic blunder by the incumbent in Fide World Chess Championship. 

After losing a pawn in the middle-game, Liren was grimly hanging on before deciding to offer to trade rooks, hoping that it would ease the pressure.

Gukesh, after taking a moment to compose himself, executed a flurry of moves
which saw his king enter the enemy camp and threaten to shepherd
his pawns to the touchline.

Ding, who had buried his head in hands in shock, stopped the clock, signalling the end of a gruelling dogfight where both sides alternatively gained and lost the lead.

Gukesh’s win netted him $2.5m (£1.96m) in prize money, but also an entry into one of the most exclusive clubs. On Friday he was due to be officially crowned world champion, becoming only the 18th in a line of champions that stretches back to 1886.

Gukesh, who hails from Chennai in Tamil Nadu, south India, learnt the rules of the game at the age of seven. He became a Grandmaster five years later and shot up the world rankings maintained by Fide, the game’s official body.

Yet it was not all easy. In the press conference after the game, he spoke of the financial hardships faced by his parents, who at one point had to take loans just to be able to send him to tournaments. His father, a doctor who had given up on his practice to support his son, could be seen pacing nervously outside the
playing hall throughout the match.

Gukesh is one of the new, young crop of Indian sensations rising to the top – four of the world top 10 are his countrymen. He is not even the highest-rated Indian player – another talent Arjun Erigaisi – is one place above him.

This meteoric rise in Indian chess was triggered by five-time world champion Viswanathan Anand, who, after winning the title in 2000, inspired a new generation of players.

He was India’s first Grandmaster in 1988; now there are over 80. India won the chess Olympiad this year, beating the powerhouses of the US and China. And the flow of talent rising up the ranks shows no sign of slowing down.

Young children train to be chess superstars

Chess coach Sai Dinesh Garikipati told The i Paper, “The last couple of years there
has been a big number of kids joining in the six to seven-year age group.”

Garikipati started the Warrior Chess Academy, in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad. According to him, the gateway moment was when India hosted the Chess Olympiad in 2022. The month-long event which had teams from 186 countries attracted enormous media attention.

“Even Prime Minister Modi was tweeting about it,” he said.

Garikipati began expanding and opened two more branches, with a total of 200 students per year. He now thinks Gukesh’s win means “there will definitely be another boost” in interest.

His academy operates from a converted garage in a side street, not far from the complexes of tech giants such as Google and Amazon. It is one of dozens of such academies in every city in India.

Inside is a long table covered with chess boards that bisects the room. There are half a dozen students, boys and girls, around five to eight years old. Some of the children are so young that only their heads rise above the pieces. The academy starts its classes at 6pm to cater to children who have been enrolled by their parents as part of after-school activities.

Garikipati explains that the “parent’s attitude is that chess develops reasoning skills, and calculation. A child learns before taking each move, to find out what are the advantages and the disadvantages. Even for (college) entrance exams, or board exams, such reasoning skills are needed”.

Children watch as a game from the world championship match is replayed on a flatscreen TV on the wall. Garikipati occasionally asks them a question based on what is happening. The children are using the match as a learning exercise, trying to guess the move their hero Gukesh has made. A disembodied voice breaks in at moments and there are another dozen students are participating virtually.

Over the past decade, the infrastructure to produce champions has been put in place, akin to the former Soviet Union which was known as an assembly-line for
Grandmasters.

But the Indian effort is very much a “desi” operation, highly decentralised and idiosyncratic. This is the new India, borne on the tide of the 100 million strong aspirational middle-class.

Chess also, rather improbably, is becoming increasingly popular as a
spectator sport. The YoutTube stream of Chessbase India shows hundreds of thousands of viewers. While other broadcasts mostly feature sober-looking Grandmasters in suits and ties, the Indian show is a defining contrast.

It has four hosts, including a stand-up- comedian who peppers the analysis with one-liners. It is in front of a live audience who whoop and shout. When Gukesh plays a strong move, one of the hosts treats it like a Mexican football announcer
confronted with a goal.

This has been the innovation of the Indian affiliate of ChessBase, a leading German software company. Match games can typically last up to seven hours, and was considered a difficult sell for advertisers and viewers alike. But by making their productions energetic and edgy, aimed squarely at the casual player, ChessBase India has cracked the code in making the ancient game fit
for modern streaming.

Their short videos and reels on players are shared widely across social media, giving chess stars the same treatment as cricket-mad India gives to the wielders of the willow. At the watch party a singer belts out “Go Go Guki”, a Hindi hip-hop song that was composed for the event. “Your every move is watched by the nation/in this condition of emotion and tension” he sings.

Apart from Gukesh, there are also stars like 21-year-old Arjun Erigaisi who is ranked 4th in the world. Arjun recently signed a $1.5m (£1.2m) contract with a high-frequency trading company as part of a sponsorship deal. Shy and soft-spoken in real life, he has been dubbed the “madman” for his unorthodox attacks and bold openings by former champion Magnus Carlsen.

Unlike the older generation like Anand, who had to find a physical chess club and play over the board, Erigiasi is part of the generation who honed their skills by playing thousands of games online, specialising in “bullet” chess, where both sides have just one minute to play the entire game.

This unorthodox approach means that the current crop of Indians have speeded-up reflexes and are very skilled in ultra-tactical play. Rising internet connectivity – India has some of the world’s cheapest data plans – and a plethora of websites offering arenas to play means that anyone can play.

Soviet-era books and the pandemic created new generation of champions

But the foundation was laid much earlier, going back to the late 90s. N. Ramaraju, a leading coach and founder of an elite finishing school for prodigies knows exactly what the inflection point was.

The Soviet Union had dissolved and its repository of knowledge, once jealously hoarded, was diffusing through the world. “It was a revolution” he says. He is talking about the time when a 12-book series on the opening by a former Russian champion Alexander Khalifman made its way to India.

This was the early 2000s in India, when training materials were almost absent. During tournaments, there was a flourishing trade in Xerox copies of books dealing with opening theory imported from the West. Thanks to repeated photocopying, the moves would be so faded that reading them was akin to deciphering hieroglyphics.

“It was milestone” Ramaraju says, when Khalifman’s series hit the market, “based on that, youngsters began learning opening knowledge”.

“Till then, we didn’t know how to work, or even the process”. As a player he would use the books, and when he moved to training he built a curriculum based on this Soviet knowledge. ‘The pattern was created’ he says, “Not just me but all coaches in India”.

The opening phase in chess is marked by certain optimal configurations of pieces and pawns. These openings, through countless play, have led to advanced theories on how to deploy them in the most optimal manner.

Indians from the time when Ramaraju was a player had a reputation for playing the first phase by instinct. This invariably meant heavy defeats when pitted against Soviet or Western players who were “booked up”. But by the mid 2000s, access to books as well as increased use of computers was swiftly bridging the gap.

The final part of the puzzle was the pandemic.

“You can divide Indian chess, before lockdown and after lockdown” says Ramaraju. The chess world overnight shifted to an online model. This mean that Indians who couldn’t afford to play tournaments in Europe or America now could compete on an equal footing.

“They got confidence” says Ramaraju, because they pitted against the world’s best from such an early age.

Even as social media witnessed an avalanche of congratulations, from Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Sachin Tendulkar, Gukesh was already talking about his title defence in two years time, saying he would “love to play against an Indian opponent in the World Championship”