The boy facing questions from the media believes his career is stagnating. At the age of 16. It’s an age where athletes in other sports are still taking their first decisive steps. But such is the nature of chess these days, and such is the rapid pace at which things have happened for Abhimanyu Mishra, that a slowdown for him feels like stagnation.
If his career had continued in the fast lane, Abhimanyu Mishra estimates that he would have been rated around 2,730 by now. The Indian-origin American grandmaster, at seven, became the youngest person in the US to hit 2,000 ELO rating, then crossed 2,200 by the age of nine before becoming the youngest international master at 10 and then the youngest grandmaster in the world at 12. Recently, at the FIDE Grand Swiss tournament, he also became the youngest player to defeat a reigning world chess champion in classical chess when he took down D Gukesh. But after the fast rise, came the plateau.
Currently, the 16-year-old’s rating is moored at 2642, almost a 100 rating points below where he should have been at by his own estimation.
“I should have been one of the world’s elite by now,” laments Mishra a day before he played his first game at the FIDE World Cup in Goa in the second round (where he was held to a draw by Emirati grandmaster Salem AR Saleh in the first game on Tuesday).
Mishra reads the comments that people post online that his rating should have been much higher given the pace his career had picked early on. And he agrees.
“There are many people online and so on who say that in the last four years, my rating should be a lot higher. And frankly, I agree with them. I believe I should be much higher than what I am currently sitting at,” Mishra tells a group of Indian journalists on the sidelines of the World Cup.
Mishra believes his career is stagnating because of him having to balance academics and chess, a problem many of India’s top grandmasters like Gukesh, Praggnanandhaa and Arjun Erigaisi have never had to face. The lack of sponsors for American chess players is another issue, one that becomes glaringly apparent when he looks at grandmasters from Asian nations like Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, who either have state backing or have benefactors with deep pockets. The problem of sponsorship in American chess was recently highlighted by World no.2 Hikaru Nakamura, who had said he only got his first sponsor when he had breached the world’s top 10.
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Mishra reads the comments that people post online that his rating should have been much higher given the pace his career had picked early on. (PHOTO: Eteri Kublashvilii/FIDE)
“I have a feeling it’s going to get very difficult soon. To reach the top, I need resources that I don’t currently have. My family has already spent tons of their own resources. It’s a bit weird in America. There, somehow it feels like chess isn’t considered as much of a sport. We have the St Louis Chess Club (which helps players by organising elite tournaments), and that’s great. But other than that, there’s not that much support in general,” Mishra says. “The main issue, in the last couple of years, is the lack of corporate sponsorship for me. I have been studying eight to 10 hours a day as well (at an online school in the USA). I’ve been living in this way for years. It’s painful, but it’s needed. I spend eight hours a day on chess and slightly more on schoolwork. I am equally good at that as well. In fact, I’m taking advanced courses. I am a straight A student. But since that takes up half of my time, it’s very difficult to compete in chess and to go to a higher level. You look at other players that are there, even at a younger age than me, even from smaller countries… they are all fully funded. And they spend 24×7 on chess. And here I am having to balance both of these things. That’s why my rating has been stagnating. I have been stagnating for a while.”
Ivy League dreams
Mishra says that at the moment, it feels like he can break into an Ivy League school like Princeton — which he calls one of his dream schools — with one fifth of the effort he needs to break into the super elite of chess. He says if he decides to go down the road as an academic, rather than becoming a full-time chess player, he plans to pursue something that’s at the crossroads of finance and technology.
Ask him if he likes to chase records, and he says: “As of now, I don’t. When I first started off, these records were always nice intermediate targets. Now I don’t think there’s basically anything left (for him to break). It’s nice to have the records. But overall, these records don’t mean much.”
Mishra looks at the players he defeated as markers that good things are still possible for him. Last year, at Biel, he took down Praggnanandhaa with black pieces in the first round and had a performance rating of 2860 in the first half of the classical portion. This year, at Grand Swiss, he took down Gukesh. He’s also had draws against players like Arjun Erigaisi.
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“I look at the result at FIDE Grand Swiss as an indication that I still fully intend to reach the top,” he says.
