Vishwanathan Anand to mentor at Tech Mahindra's phygital Chess League

Vishwanathan Anand, Anand Mahindra, last year’s Chess Olympiad and The Queen's Gambit are the unlikely but interesting parts of the new Global Chess League that Tech Mahindra has announced under the mentorship of five-time World Chess Champion Anand. 

Mahindra, a fan of the sport, has been involved with chess as a spectator for some time. Last year, when India won (tied with Russia) the Chess Olympiad, he tweeted that it was a great spectator sport during lockdown and also tweeted about the subsequent tech glitches that led to a tie outcome in the finals. 

One thing led to the other, and Tech Mahindra on Monday launched a phygital (physical and digital) Global Chess League, mentored by Anand. 

“Playing chess over the Internet has been a fact of life for maybe 10 years before the pandemic. And streaming (the game) apparently has been going on for a couple years as well. So they both predated (the pandemic). What happened last year was really that the numbers of people who started discovering chess went crazy,” said Anand. 

 

The “big barrier” for people to take to chess was not adoption of technology, but the “mental resistance” that chess was a difficult game, he said.  

That is where Netflix’s widely popular show from last year, The Queen’s Gambit helped. “I've read about Spain, Brazil, and the US that stores just started to run out of chess boards and chess clocks... it's just been enormous. And it's driving so much discussion. In fact, every chess player is trying to bring the Queen's Gambit into every conversation. So it has had a dramatic impact,” Anand added. 

At the Mahindra group owned Tech Mahindra, the Global Chess League is an extension of the various partnerships its has with different sports- from FIFA to Indian Premier League’s Kings XI Punjab. 

In the current partnership, one of the aims is also to raise the profile of the sport. New-age technologies such as 5G, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality will be leveraged to engage a global audience. 

At Tech Mahindra too, it wasn’t all the usual company strategists who helped build the idea of the League.

“This was CP (Gurnani, Tech Mahindra CEO)'s idea...he actually said you know, you guys are not the age group that this partnership is looking for. So go get to your children who are teenagers are or about to be teenagers, the next generation, and ask them what they feel about it,” said Jagdish Mitra, Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Growth at Tech Mahindra.

The firm’s goal is to get the League started this year. “Whether it's 5G or AR, VR or the opportunity with fantasy leagues, you can just imagine that you're in a virtual world playing with the grandmasters or the international masters. We can create a year-long exercise around this tournament, which is going to be difficult for any other sport to do. And the engagement can be tremendous. And it aligns well with our focus around digital technology, and 5G and our sports tech business,” Mitra added. 

 

Current plans envision the League to engage players from all levels – professional or otherwise. The League will have 8 franchise owned teams from across the world. The teams will comprise of a mix of titled women and men players along with juniors and wildcard entrants playing each other in a Round Robin format.

In the phygital format, there will be different teams that would assemble in a separate venue with an arbiter, a stage and so on preserving the physical element of the game, but the opponent will be in some other part of the world. 

“By moving this to a proper venue, we hope to eliminate the problem of Internet disconnections, and bad webcams and all that stuff as well,” said Anand. 

As part of the mentorship, he said he was also looking at different scoring methods, letting fans  guess the moves that are going to be played, guess the results of games, create fantasy teams, and so on.