For the second time in three years, chess is coming home. A sport which originated as chaturanga comes home to India with the FIDE World Cup with an unusual host in the form of scenic Goa. When India hosted the Olympiad in 2022, the tournament acted as the first warning shot in the air that a cavalcade of Indians were poised to march down the battlefield of 64 squares. Now, an unprecedented 24 Indians are in the mix at the 206-player World Cup at home.
At the previous World Cup in Baku just two years back, there were 10 Indians in contention, with five of them getting first round byes courtesy of being among the top 50 seeds. This year, eight Indians are among the top 50 and will thus earn direct entry into the second round, with the top three seeding spots being locked by the trio of Gukesh, Arjun Erigaisi, and Praggnanandhaa.
And while Praggnanandhaa stunned the world at Baku 2023 by reaching the final after starting as the 31st seed—beating the likes of Hikaru Nakamura and Fabiano Caruana on the way—five-time world champion Viswanathan Anand believes an Indian player could go all the way this time around.
“There are lots of excellent players who hail from India now, so it’s natural that the World Cup reflects that scenario. I’m very sure the Indians have a very decent chance to win as well. First of all, because of the numbers (of Indians in contention). Then, by motivation. It’s quite likely it could be an Indian (winning this). It could even be an all India final. But you could just as well make the case for the rest of the world,” five-time world champion Viswanathan Anand told The Indian Express.
The World Cup is missing the troika of the world’s top three—Magnus Carlsen, Hikaru Nakamura and Fabiano Caruana—but is not short of star power with the likes of two-time world championship contender Ian Nepomniachtchi, Anish Giri, Hans Niemann, Nodirbek Abdusattorov, Levon Aronian and Vincent Keymer in the fray. While Giri has already qualified for the prestigious Candidates tournament, the World Cup offers three out of the eight spots into the Candidates, which is a qualifier for the next world championship.
Anand praised world champion Gukesh Dommaraju throwing his hat into the ring, even though he cannot earn a spot at the Candidates.
“Gukesh is very keen to compete and prove his mettle even though he doesn’t need to qualify (for the Candidates). For all the other Indians, they know that this is a great chance. Actually, for many of the Indians, this is the only chance now to qualify for the Candidates. So they will be motivated,” said Anand, serving a warning to the rest of the field.
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The last time the World Cup happened in India, in 2002 at Hyderabad’s Ramoji Film City, many of India’s current flagbearers like Gukesh, Pragg, Arjun and Divya were not even born. Anand was there, winning the event despite one-on-one knockout clashes not being a regular phenomenon in that era. Anand had a turbulent start, but ended up winning an event with players like Rustam Kasimdzhanov.
“I really enjoyed the World Cup in 2002. It was a very nice venue, had lots of wide open spaces. We had some peace and quiet. My best memory is actually surviving the qualification phase, and after that it went a bit smoother. I remember after the fifth round, I was very happy just to have qualified. The knockout format was relatively new then. It had been tried in events like Wijk aan Zee (Tata Steel Masters) and Tilberg and from 1997, we had the format for World Championships.”
Anand pointed out how the knockout format of the World Cup (where players play two classical games over two days, and then tiebreaks if needed) poses its own challenges. “A knockout format requires a slightly different set of skills. Instead of playing in a long event, you are in effect playing a tournament every two days. If you qualify, you go on to the next event. I think the difference now is that thanks to the proliferation of online events, and rapid tournaments, a lot of which are knockouts, players are a lot more comfortable with the knockout format. Every possible situation you can be in, these players have probably encountered. As a result the knockout events are very comfortable these days.”
The fact that nearly 10 per cent of the field at the World Cup is Indian should not surprise anyone. Of course, one of the reasons for this spike in numbers is the redrawing of zones by FIDE because of the Russia-Ukraine War. With the Russian federation opting to move away from the European Chess Union and joining the Asian Chess Federation (ACF) in the aftermath of the war, FIDE redrew the boundaries and gave India a zone of its own. Thus the Indian National Championships in 2024 suddenly became more important, because instead of one quota on offer to the World Cup, the Nationals suddenly had seven quotas to give. At the 2024 Nationals, the top 7 players — Karthik Venkataraman, Surya Shekhar Ganguly, Neelash Saha, Diptayan Ghosh, Aronyak Ghosh, Himal Gusain and Lalit Babu MR — secured spots for the upcoming FIDE World Cup in Goa.
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“A few World Cup cycles back, we had to finish among the top 5 of the Asian Championships to get a World Cup quota. Now our own Nationals offer seven spots,” Srinath Narayanan told The Indian Express.
For FIDE, that the World Cup is happening in India, and the fact that there are an unprecedented number of Indians is just an indicator of where the wind is blowing in the sport.
“India is not just the ancient home of chess, it is a global modern powerhouse. This World Cup is being held in India because India is now a central pillar in the global structure of our sport,” FIDE President Arkady Dvorkovich said ahead of the tournament. “It is absolutely right that the World Cup is returning to India after 23 years. India is not just the ancient home of chess, but one of the greatest modern powerhouses of chess in the world, driving change and innovation in our sport.”
