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

India now has 83 chess Grandmasters, and going by the peerless Viswanathan Anand's reckoning, this generation will dominate for a decade or two

This is the first in a two-part series on chess in India. You can read part 2 here.

Just about a year ago, a team consisting of D Gukesh (Born May 2006), R Praggnanandhaa (August 2005), Nihal Sarin (July 2004), Raunak Sadhwani (Dec 2005), and B Adhiban (August 1992) won the bronze medal in the Open Section at the Chennai chess Olympiad. Their female compatriots also won the bronze.

This was the best result India had ever had in a monster event with teams from 186 nations.

The medallists, however, were deeply disappointed, and so were many Team India fans. Both teams were gunning for the gold.

At the time of writing, one of the members of that “bronze team”, Praggnanandhaa, is playing the World Number 1, Magnus Carlsen, in the finals of the FIDE World Cup in Baku. Pragg, who celebrated his 18th birthday while playing this event, has beaten the World No 2 and World No 3 to reach the finals. He is guaranteed a spot in the next World Championship cycle.

This would already be considered a great achievement. But Pragg will undoubtedly be disappointed if he cannot beat Carlsen. Coming second is not good enough.

That generational shift in attitude exemplifies the revolution in Indian chess. Most of the players mentioned above are young. You can add Arjun Erigaisi (Born September 2003) and several others to the list of the young hopefuls.

Those youngsters are all grandmasters. Along with veterans such as Vidit Gujrathi, who is all of 29, Adhiban and Harikrishna (37), they have had impressive accomplishments in the recent past.

India won the online Olympiad in 2020. Four Indians made it to the quarter-finals of the World Cup, in a Wimbledon-style knockout format. Pragg has beaten Carlsen five times and lost to him seven times with several draws thrown in. He has reasons to fancy his chances.

Multiple world champion Viswanathan Anand says, “This current crop of young talent is a golden generation”, while Carlsen reckons India will have multiple world champions soon.

Anand was India’s very first grandmaster, the highest title in chess, back in 1987, and he carried the torch almost alone in the 1990s.

The 53-year-old Anand, who describes himself as semi-retired, is still among the Top 10 in the world, but was recently overtaken as India’s number one by Gukesh, who lost to Carlsen in the quarter-finals of this World Cup. Gukesh has not only made it to the World Top 10 at age 17, but has a good chance of qualifying for the next World Championship cycle.

There are quite a few talented Indians at the top of the chess ladder. But they are not wild cards that have appeared from nowhere. They are at the apex of a vast pyramid.

Approximately 39,000 Indians are rated players, which means they have played a rated tournament sometime. Around 10,000 of them have played in a tournament within the last year. That is the base of the pyramid. The 20th edition of the Delhi International Open attracted more than 1,000 local participants, as well as GMs from more than 18 countries, who battled it out for the Rs 45 lakh prize money. 

At the apex of the pyramid, India has 83 Grandmasters, if we include the two who have completed the requirements but not yet received the formal title, including two women. More than half of these GMs are under 20. There are two Indians -- Gukesh and Anand -- in the World Top 10, six in the Top 30, and nine in the Top 100. There are eight Indian women in the Top 100 women’s list. There are 21 Indians among the world’s Top 100 Juniors (players under 20).

More than 1.2 million Indians subscribe to the popular chessbase India YouTube channel. Not surprisingly, there is also sponsorship available from India Inc.

Interest is spread across regions.

Take the Indian Top 10. Gukesh, Anand, and Pragg are from Chennai, which remains the epicentre of Indian chess. But Vidit is from Nasik, Harikrishna from Guntur, Arjun Erigaisi from Warangal, Nihal Sarin from Thrissur, Sunilduth Naranayanan from Trivandrum, Aryan Chopra from Delhi, and Luke Leon Mendonca from Goa. There are clusters of GMs from Mumbai, Pune, Nagpur, Kolkata and Delhi, apart from Chennai and Hyderabad.

Though Chennai has the two best-known coaching centres run by GM R B Ramesh, who trains Pragg, and Anand, there are good coaches everywhere, and many schools offer chess as an extracurricular activity.

However, at least part of the reason why Indian chess is exploding is that the game is digitally driven, and so are Gen Z and Gen Alpha. In earlier eras, Indians struggled for lack of timely information and study material, and there was an absence of coaches who could teach the basics, let alone nuances.

That started changing in the 1990s. Garry Kasparov, the former world champion from Russia, and Anand pioneered the use of electronic databases in the mid-1990s, with around 5,000 games available digitally. Now, commonly available electronic databases contain millions of GM games annotated by experts. These can be searched and studied to improve preparation or understand any sort of position. Any old smartphone equipped with a free programme plays better chess than Carlsen, so analysis does not absolutely require human oversight from a coach.

You can also play chess on the internet round the clock; at any time, a couple of million games are going on. The biggest online platform, chess.com, averages 38 million games daily, and Lichess, the second most popular, does 10 million. Streamers such as GM Hikaru Nakamura, World No 3, analyse games in channels that millions of subscribers track.

The peerless Anand made the game respectable and won the first laurels. But his legacy is in good hands. By his reckoning, “This generation of young Indian players will dominate for at least a decade or two.”