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Piece de resistance: Kunal Pradhan writes on the path to our Grandmasters
Watching the Hungarian Peter Leko struggle against India’s Arjun Erigaisi, my mind went to a different time and place: my first brush with chess at this level, over two decades ago.
In Goa, where rural rusticity intersects with urban glitz, where the days are slow and the nights are short, where social calendars teem with events and acts, the Chess World Cup trickled in this month almost surreptitiously. A resort tucked away in a corner of Arpora, a neighbourhood where beachside revelry ends and local humdrum begins, was charged by a strange IYKYK energy.
Here, on a sunny Thursday afternoon, the Hungarian Peter Leko, 46, in blue tapered jeans, white shirt and a black linen jacket, walked into the tournament hall to face his fears a few minutes ahead of schedule. Now a celebrated chess commentator, Leko became a Grandmaster in 1994, at 14 years, 4 months and 22 days old — the youngest to get the tag at the time.
The seat across the board from him was soon filled by a 22-year-old Indian in a steel-grey suit and no tie. Arjun Erigaisi, born in Warangal and raised on chessboards around the world, got the Grandmaster title in 2018 when he was 14 years, 11 months and 13 days old.
Over the course of the next two hours, Leko, in the winter of his career, and Erigaisi, his sun on the rise, engaged in Rapid battles of mayhem.
The players seemed tranquil on the surface, but the violence on the board was slowly palpable in their demeanour. Leko put his palms on his temples; Erigaisi rested his head on his fist. Leko’s boots lifted at the heels; one of Erigaisi’s loafers did tiny pirouettes under the table. Leko adjusted his spectacles and winced; Erigaisi fidgeted with his stubble-bordering-on-beard and sighed.
They were watched closely by a small band of enthusiasts: excited schoolchildren in uniform on an excursion, fussy FIDE officials on duty, all-knowing journalists on assignment, hapless resort guests driven by curiosity, and hardened fans who had travelled from different parts of India for the occasion.
This was spectator sport at its worst and its best, depending on what you saw and how much you understood. But it was still a moment in time, as a generation of young champions continues to democratise Indian chess in the Age of Anand.
More on that in a bit.
MIND OF A WINNER
Watching Leko struggle against Erigaisi in the tiebreaker — he lost both games to be knocked out of the tournament — took my mind back to a different time and place; to my first brush with chess at the highest level, more than two decades ago.
It was the spring of 2000 in Delhi, and Leko, at the peak of his powers, was locked in a gripping battle with the Russian Alexander Khalifman, the reigning FIDE world champion at the time.
In the press room at the world championships at the Grand Hyatt, a large magnetic chessboard was propped up vertically, with the black and white pieces stuck on it for analysis. A 20-year-old Leko, having drawn the game with black pieces in a fierce endgame battle, walked in and took control of the contraption to give us a post-game briefing.
From memory, Leko readjusted the pieces on the board to where they had stood after 16 moves in the encounter. At this point, he said, Khalifman could have made X move, and shifted a piece on the board accordingly. This, he said, would have meant I did A, he did B, then I did C, and he did D… He kept moving the pieces as he spoke to show how the board would have looked in the 30th move if that scenario had played out, giving him a pawn advantage. But Khalifman, he said, did Y instead. So Leko reset the board to the 16th move, kept changing it rapidly to show what actually happened, and how there was a parity in pieces by the time they entered the final stages of the game. “Any questions?” he asked with a smile.
It took all of 10 minutes for Leko to offer this mesmerising and unforgettable glimpse into a Grandmaster’s mind.
To be sure, he eventually lost that battle with Khalifman, who in turn went on to lose to Viswanathan Anand, who then beat Michael Adams in the semi-final and Alexei Shirov in the final to become the first Indian world champion.
ANAND, THE INCOMPARABLE
Anand, born in Mayiladuthurai and raised in Chennai, became India’s first Grandmaster in 1987, when he was 18 years and 17 days old. In 1995, he challenged Garry Kasparov for the world title at the World Trade Center in New York, and lost.
In 2000, at the tournament where Leko offered that masterclass, Anand won the crown by beating Shirov in the realigned post-Karparov chess world.
In 2007, when he recaptured the crown, he decided to not let go for a while. Over the course of the next six years, Anand was the top gun, living and training in Spain but quietly and unwittingly inspiring India’s future golden generation.
When the five-time champion was eventually unseated by Magnus Carlsen in 2013, he slowly veered towards a new mission: an Indian chess citadel that would go beyond one or two players. Erigaisi was 10 years old, for instance, when Anand’s reign ended. His fellow musketeers, R Praggnanandhaa and reigning world champion D Gukesh, were eight and seven respectively.
But the story goes far beyond those three.
Wrap your head around this for a measure of Anand’s impact: India had only two Grandmasters (Dibyendu Barua was the second) when Anand played Kasparov on the 107th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center; five by the time he became world champion in 2000; 16 by the time he reclaimed the crown in 2007; 35 by the time his reign ended; 65 by the time he stopped playing regularly on the circuit in 2020; and 89 Grandmasters at the time of the ongoing World Cup.
Anand now runs the WestBridge Anand Chess Academy in Chennai, where most of India’s top players have at some point or the other over the last five years taken lessons directly from “Vishy sir”. So, the Chess Olympiad bronze in 2023 in Chennai, the gold in 2024 in Budapest and the glory that lies ahead are part of a natural progression.
The pieces, if you will, are already on the board.
(The views expressed are personal.)
