Viswanathan Anand, Fide’s new deputy president, said the international chess federation will give its best shot to bring back No. 1 chess player Magnus Carlsen into the World Championship fold. “As of now in this cycle Nepo (Ian Nepomniachtchi) will play (Ding) Liren. I guess in the coming months there will be discussions on to see how to bring back Carlsen,” Anand told The Telegraph. Nepomniachtchi is the Candidates champion and Liren finished runner-up.
In practice, the Candidates winner challenges the champion. Last month 31-year-old Carlsen, a five-time world champion, relinquished the title he retained in December by defeating Nepomniachtchi in Dubai. He said he was not motivated enough to play another match. “He has never been a fan of the format,” Anand said. The last match was a 14-game affair with Carlsen sealing the title in the 11th game itself, reaching 7.5 points.
Anand said one of the main jobs of Fide now would be to make chess more exciting and expand its reach. “Even to the remotest island. That’s the target. We will work overtime to take the game to more women and also to the physically disabled,” he said.
Russia’s Arkady Dvorkovich was re-elected as the Fide president, defeating Ukrainian Grandmaster Andrii Baryshpolets on the sidelines of the recently-concluded Chess Olympiad in Mamallapuram, near Chennai.
The hosts put up a good show in the Olympiad with India B and the women’s team winning bronze medals. Anand said it’s a triumph of youth in this edition. “Whether the teenagers of Uzebekistan (champions) or India B, it’s the youngsters who delivered. In India B barring Adhiban (Baskaran) all are young.
Praggu (17-year-old Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa), (Dommaraju) Gukesh (16), and Nihal (Sarin, 18) are young and ready to take on the world. This Olympiad showed that there is a generational shift in chess in India. I work with all of them (in the Westbridge Anand Chess Academy) and it’s a joy to watch them taking wings,” he said.
Earlier this year, Praggnanandhaa’s win over Carlsen in an online chess competition got a lot of traction worldwide, while Gukesh and Sarin were two of five individual gold medallists in this Olympiad.
Gukesh won the gold in the top board of the open section, scoring a staggering 9/11 with a performance rating of 2867. In the second board, Sarin had a performance rating of 2774. Eighteen-year-old Arjun Erigiasi, playing for India A, became the seventh Indian to cross the 2700 Elo ratings within a month after Gukesh reached the mark. Anand, however, agreed that there is still a lot to be done to make chess a national pastime.
“As of now chess is more one-state centric (Tamil Nadu) with one-third of the Grandmasters coming from there. We will have to work hard to make it more popular, a sort of a mass game, a pastime,” the country’s first Grandmaster said. India got its 75th Grandmaster in 15-year-old V Pranav last week.
He is the 27th GM from Tamil Nadu. If his new assignment as Fide deputy president and India’s chess ascendency excite the former five-time world champion, Russia’s continuing war on Ukraine — it’s almost six months — makes him feel despondent. “The biggest tragedy of humanity is war. It’s almost six months and it’s still on. I hope Russia stops this. We still get to hear so many tragic stories from this war. But can my words balm the pains of the thousands?” Russia and Belarus have been banned by the Fide, like other world sports bodies, from participating in its tournaments.
Anand is probably the only sportsperson in India who criticised Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine from the very first day.