How tech and affordable internet helped make India a chess powerhouse

From watching a game on a smartphone to playing a favourite chess opening using a database, modern tech and affordable internet have helped India produce one chess prodigy after another

This is the second in a two-part series on chess in India. You can read part 1 here.

Back in the 1920s, chess world champion Jose Raoul Capablanca said, "You will have to lose hundreds of games before you become a good player." In the era before online chess, electronic databases and silicon engines, simply playing a hundred games (win or lose) took a week or more. Moreover, except for residents of Moscow, Leningrad or somewhere else with many strong players, the quality of opposition could be dodgy.

Nowadays, it takes less than three hours to play a hundred games, and on Chess.com or Lichess, you're guaranteed strong opposition. On any given day, when they aren't playing serious tournaments (and sometimes when they are!), you will find young stars like Pragg, Nihal Sarin, Arjun Erigaisi and Gukesh online at Chess.com shooting bullets, as it's known.

Bullet chess has a brutally simple time control. A game starts with 60 seconds on each player's clock. If the game isn't decided any other way, the first player to run out of time loses. Pragg and co. will frequently zip through sessions where they play 150 bullets in a row. When they play each other or some big-name GM like Hikaru Nakamura or Magnus Carlsen, you might find thousands of kibitzers watching and cheering (or jeering).

Also read: Indian chess is having a moment. Pragganandhaa in World Cup final is proof

This is only one of the many ways in which digitisation has changed chess, and it's one of the reasons why India has become a chess powerhouse. Bullet has been around for ten years or so, but Indians could only start playing it seriously once reliable 4G and fibre broadband became commonly available. Prior to that, lags in connections made the bullet impossible to play in India.

The smartphone is a key tool in modern chess. Very few chess players actually carry a physical chessboard around – many youngsters don't possess one. 

A smartphone is indispensable, however, and a laptop is desirable. 

The phone lets you watch games, play games and analyse games. A free program like Stockfish running on an old smartphone plays better chess than the world champion. A smartphone can also be used as a chess clock to play a physical game if you want.

Taking it a step further, a laptop is an even bigger force multiplier, though you can't lug it everywhere. On a laptop with Chessbase or some other databasing program installed, a chess player can plug in a favourite opening (or a position with specific material balance or theme or the name of a player) and search through mega databases containing millions of games, looking for similar examples. If they wish to look at a position with a total of seven pieces or less, they plug into a "tablebase", and the computer instantly spits out perfect assessments and perfect play.

In its technical aspects, chess is largely about quick, efficient pattern recognition. It is applied mathematics, like music. You don't need deep life experience or broad knowledge of multiple subjects to recognise patterns. It's, therefore, no surprise that chess, mathematics and music can churn out prodigies.

Pattern recognition improves the more you practice (though it needs to be mindful practice to be truly effective). If you solve a hundred equations, the 101st equation is easier—Ditto for learning rook endgames or Sicilian defences. 

Digitisation accelerates this process. This means more prodigies, and it means the said prodigies develop their skills faster. This is also true in music – just check out the number of teens and pre-teens getting golden buzzers and four-chair turns on Britain's Got Talent or The Voice. 

Between 1957 and 1991, the youngest player to achieve the Grandmaster title was Bobby Fischer at 15 years and 6 months. In 1991, Judit Polgar did it when she was two months younger. The current record is held by Abhimanyu Mishra (12 years, 4 months). There are more than 40 players (including six Indians) who have become GMs before they turned 15. Almost all belong to the digital age.

Preparation and practice may be much easier, but you do need human coaches, however. Oddly enough, players at the top and the bottom of the chess ladder need coaches the most. 

At the bottom of the ladder, coaches are needed to teach the basics. The rules, the relative strengths of pieces, concepts like centralisation, etc. Near the top of the ladder, coaches spot the nuances that help talented players tweak their repertoire, probe their opponent's weaknesses, and manage their thinking times. That's where the genius of a R B Ramesh (who has coached Indian teams and juniors to many medals) shows up. At the very top of the ladder, the services of a trainer/second like Peter Heine Nielsen (Carlsen's second) and buddy relationships like that of Anish Giri and Vidit Gujrathi (both very strong players) can add enormous value.

Viswanathan Anand was coached for the first time in 1991 (by exiled Soviet GM Mikhail Gureyvich) after he was already a world championship candidate and World number 5. This generation of players has access to each other as well as to overseas coaches. Former world champion Vladimir Kramnik and challenger Boris Gelfand have both held intensive camps for Indian youngsters. 

Tools like Zoom and Google Meet have also made distant study easy. 

There's far more money in the game now. Anand was the first Indian chess professional. Prior to that, players tended to be absorbed into various government organisations under the "sports quota". Although there are plenty of Indian layers who are also employed by ONGC and the oil-marketing companies, and the Railways, etc., many of them are full-time professionals. They make a living playing, coaching and streaming. While prize money on the Indian circuit has improved due to sponsorships, streaming is a new source of revenue. For example, Chessbase India has 1.3 million subscribers on its YouTube Channel, and platforms like Twitch have many successful streamers. Digital natives like Gen Z and Gen Alpha are very comfortable with these gigs.

Anand – middle-class, polite, well-educated and a world champion - was one of those who helped make chess respectable. Most parents are extremely comfortable with their children learning the game, and many schools offer extra-curricular programs in chess. The branding is associated with learning to think logically, improving concentration, etc., and of course, you can make a reasonable living from it. This is true, but arguably, poker inculcates the same qualities and offers players the potential to make far more money. However, the average parent would respond very negatively to the idea of their eight-year-old learning to play poker while welcoming the teaching of chess. That's where the branding of chess counts, and it's the reason why multitudes of children throng chess tournaments.