India’s Young Chess Players Defy Norms with Aggressive Style: Anish Giri

India’s Young Chess Players Defy Norms, Dominate Chess Olympiad

New Delhi: When you start playing chess at the junior level, you never play for a draw. There is no sense of the future and none of the past too. You aren’t worried about rankings or the opponent. You sit at the table and winning is all that comes to mind.

Anish Giri believes India has “layers and layers” of good chess players. But the higher they climb up the ratings, the lower this sense of adventure becomes. As an elite, you are supposed to change. That was always said, everybody assumed it to be the case, and everybody followed that rule.

“But these youngsters, they sort of, maybe they are too arrogant to listen or they sort of stay the same way and they go after the top players as if they were still in these open tournaments. And it sort of works too,” said Giri, who has a peak Elo rating of 2802.

Works seems to be an understatement given how they dominated the Chess Olympiad. The Indian men’s team won 27 out of 44 games during the tournament and lost just once. Giri believes there was an element of luck too but in the end, it was the sheer class that bore out.

But there is no denying that this Indian team made its own luck too. Their aggressive style helps them rack up the wins and with the wins came the confidence to take on even stronger opponents.

The one thing that the Chess Olympiad did show was that the overall strength of Indian chess is improving rapidly. This is also visible in events like the Global Chess League where Giri is an icon player for the PBG Alaskan Knights. The team will also include Nodirbek Abdusattorov and Nihal Sarin.

“For a long time, these players gravitated towards chess because of Viswanathan Anand’s achievements but now with the youngsters taking over, Gukesh’s World Championship match against Ding Liren in November becomes particularly important. A new generation requires a new hero,” said Giri.

As things stand, Giri sees Gukesh as the favourite but he also believes that the tag brings a different kind of pressure with it.

“But Gukesh has enough time to calm the mind before the match begins on November 20 and perhaps this is where the aggressive style will help. He’ll not play the moment, he’ll not play Ding — he’ll just be playing a game of chess; a game he’d love to win.”