India’s first grandmaster Viswanathan Anand
When Viswanathan Anand became India’s first grandmaster in 1988, chess wasn’t really a thing in India. Cut to 2024, and India now has 85 grandmasters, has won two gold medals in the recently-concluded Chess Olympiad, and teenager D Gukesh is all set to fight grandmaster Ding Liren for the World Championship title in Singapore in November. What has caused the chess surge in the country? Anand, a five-time world champion and the man who started it all for India, shares his thoughts on the Sports UnLtd podcast. Edited excerpts:
Q. India’s recent achievements in chess must be a proud feeling for you, after having single-handedly led the country in the 90s and 2000s.
Absolutely. I feel that I was at the stage where India was rediscovering chess, in a way, through me. We were competing in many competitions for the very first time with me—I was the first grandmaster, the first Asian qualifier for the World championship cycle, the first world champion—and, at that point, India slowly started to rediscover its interest in chess. After all, we shouldn’t forget that chess originated in India and continues to be a part of our cultural transmission, even if the sport itself wasn’t followed.
But, subsequently, a lot of youngsters started taking to the game, both for the excellent habits it inculcates and fun—I know that especially during summer vacations, lots of youngsters got into chess classes—and slowly, the ecosystem grew. The first generation of grandmasters went on to finish their careers, start academies, train the next generation. Plus the fan following has been steadily increasing, and recently you feel it’s gone to another level. I would say the sport had grown considerably over the last three decades, but the pandemic, in general, was kind of an inflection point where a lot of people found the time to play chess again and thanks to technology chess was very easily followed or played.
By now, chess was a broadcast sport, and undoubtedly The Queen’s Gambit was a nice push as well.
In fact, during the pandemic, there was some social media activity around our success in the Chess Olympiad, and that’s how Mr Anand Mahindra came forward with the plan for the Global Chess League.
Q. You’ve played for nearly four decades, have won everything that’s to be won. How do you keep your hunger going?
Your needs and your motivation constantly evolve. There was a time when the world championship seemed in the future and I didn’t think about it a lot in an immediate way. Then, at some point, it became very real, something within my grasp, which I had to reach out for. After I won it the first time, I tried to re-establish myself as a player because I had gone through a difficult year, and wait for another chance. This chance came along, in the reunified form in 2007, and I understood that I was 37, and that I would have to move fast. Luckily, I succeeded and I won my world title in 2007. After that I have been enjoying competition. I was still a top player, so I tried to play very actively at the circuit. I think the underlying motivation is simply that you like the game, so you want to play—that’s the most natural environment, like water to a fish. Sometimes I play for a title, sometimes I play for joy, sometimes I play to try something.
Nowadays, of course, I have transitioned to less of a professional player. I’m professional for a couple of months in a year, but I distribute my functions more—I’m deputy president of the World Chess Federation, I’m running an academy called WACA (Westbridge Anand Chess Academy), so I’ve spread my interests a bit more.
Q. You were the first Indian to take on the mighty chess masters, like the Kasparovs, the Karpovs, the Topalovs, the Kramniks. When you started in the late 80s/early 90s, what was the perception of India as a chess-playing nation?
Once upon a time, when I was starting out, India was seen as a bit of an outlier, a country that did not actively take part in chess and had a very nascent chess scene. But as we became stronger, inevitably our presence was felt. Because of our country’s size, quite early people were saying, hey, there are lots of Indians playing in this tournament. I think the timing of the change also coincided with our IT revolution when Indians just seemed to have a reputation for IT, and chess and maybe maths. For a long time, people always said India will be the future of chess. I think it’s fair to say that, right now, due to the number of players we have at the top, it feels like that future has arrived.
Also read: I am reasonably good at chess, but there are many things I don’t understand, so I build in some caution in my assumptions: Viswanathan Anand
Q. Is there a certain point in your career, maybe with a certain victory of yours, that you thought the perception was beginning to change?
For me, it felt gradual—the more years I played in the top, the more natural it seemed. People were slowly seeing that more and more grandmasters were emerging out of India. This process has accelerated over the last decade, and I think that’s when people everywhere had the feeling that India is becoming really strong at chess. The next phase was maybe in the last two years when 3-4 of our people started to break into the top 10. That was a huge change in perception. It feels like something that people spoke of in the abstract suddenly was happening right now.
Q. What brought about this acceleration?
A lot of things coming together. I mentioned the ecosystem earlier, but you can also see that sponsors slowly started to get involved. Nowadays, most of the top Indian players have sponsors of their own, they are able to afford to train, afford the best equipment and things like that. The attention that the media pays to chess is also now consistent. People saw the Chennai Chess Olympiad and the fact that the state government organised it so quickly and efficiently, and that the Prime Minister came for the opening and the closing ceremony. It changed not just the perception abroad, but also in India—in Chennai, thanks to the Olympiad, chess seemed very present for a couple of weeks and then, for a long time afterwards, people would refer to that. You can add the Tech Mahindra Global Chess League to that, a league that, let’s say, is run by Indians.
Q. You mentor a lot of these young grandmasters now at the WACA. What makes these players stand out?
What I was looking for was young people with potential, roughly described. The first four or five were obviously a kind of golden generation—Praggnanandhaa, Gukesh, Vaishali, Leon Luke Mendonca, all of them were in that first batch and have gone on to have stellar careers. Pragg and Gukesh are in the top 10 or thereabouts, Vaishali has had a meteoric rise. The idea I had with WACA is that we should help bridge the gap, because four years ago people were asking yes, India has a lot of potential, but why is Anand the only one in the top 30? We tried to address that and now the idea is make a pipeline and help these budding chess players.
Q. What impact has AI had in chess?
AI has dramatically changed the way the game is played and the training methods, so the average strength of a chess player these days is higher than it has ever been in history. This is entirely due to the diffusion that has been possible due to computers, training and databases, but also telecommunications has made chess more accessible and user-friendly than ever before. So, the TMT (technology, media and telecom) revolution has helped spread chess, and nowadays I would say it’s truly a global sport, in the sense that our top 20 or top 50 has never been this diverse in terms of nationalities.
But AI still has a lot of role to play. When it initially impacted chess in 2016-17, it showed that so many of our conclusions, which we’ve been living with for many years, could still be improved upon, and it opened a lot of interesting avenues of research. But I think its decisive influence will be when it spreads its reach not driving research into the game so much as making learning friendly and making it possible for more people to easily come and play a game, and even improve. That part of the revolution still has got to play out.
And as AI becomes more conversational, the way people engage with the teacher etc, all that could change. I feel it could drive the growth in making chess far more global than even what it is today. I think Tech Mahindra will try to introduce that a lot in their broadcast, constantly trying to see what are the questions the audience wants answered, how do we tell them what’s going on quickly and clearly, since the game format is quite fast.
Q. About the Global Chess League, chess isn’t really known to be a league-format sport or a broadcast spectacle to hook audiences. As we built up to the second edition, how far do you think technology has been able to take the sport beyond its niche following?
Chess has a reasonable history as a broadcast sport, but principally in the online space. Slowly, over the last few years, there have been a lot of attempts at online broadcasts, having many commentators, streamers involved, and it has benefited from that. But, in a sense, it’s self-selecting, right? An online audience already knows something about chess, already plays on your platform and you bring them in to watch and you give them more content to engage with. What Tech Mahindra is trying to do with this global franchise-based league is to get partners who can join with them in investing in the sport. They’re focussed on delivering this on television, that’s why we have the focus on presentation. Every team has colour uniforms, we make grand appearances, the format is quick, it’s very unpredictable so that no team is safe till the end even if they have very good runs. The idea is to hook audience participation, but also, and this is the key for me, to hook more and more people who have a very cursory knowledge of chess.
Q. In India, we now have 85 grandmasters. Where do you see this surge going in the next 5 years?
Our numbers will inevitably keep asserting themselves, but it has to be said that there are other countries with very talented players. But if you have four or five people in the top 10 or 20, then the chances are that, for the average Indian chess fan, there’s going to be someone to relate to and look forward to in every event. It is a great era in chess for India because, as I said, with so many top players, your odds are pretty good that we’ll be competing in all the best events and all the major events for the next 10-15 years.