On Friday, while the rest of the chess world was focussed on the FIDE World Cup in India, where Indians are making waves, Raahul VS quietly won the ASEAN Individual Championship in the Philippines, a feat that sealed his grandmaster title in one shot, thus making him India’s 91st GM.
After his coronation as a grandmaster upon winning the title with a round to spare on Friday, it is unlikely that Raahul VS had any time to celebrate. On Saturday, he had to play his final game of the tournament in the Philippines from 9 am (local time) before rushing to the airport to catch a flight for Malaysia at 2.30 pm to play in the Commonwealth Chess tournament.
While Shyamsundar Mohanraj, Raahul’s chess mentor from Chennai who has created many of India’s recent grandmasters, told The Indian Express that there was some confusion about the GM title, the Indian chess federation AICF announced that Raahul was India’s 91st grandmaster.
Raahul became a GM in one shot, without needing him to accumulate any of the three norms normally needed, just like Divya Deshmukh had become a grandmaster without collecting any of the three norms because she had won the Women’s World Cup title earlier this year.
A part-time coach and an MBA aspirant from the SRM Institute of Science and Technology, Raahul has recently been working at Chess Thulir under Shyamsundar, who has now started churning out grandmasters with increasing frequency—AR Ilamparthi (India’s 90th GM), Harikrishnan A Ra (India’s 87th GM) and Srihari LR (India’s 86th GM) are all from his stables in Chennai.
“I have known Raahul since he was a kid, because he is also from Chennai. Even three or four years back, he used to ask for some advice about chess. Then finally a few months back he came to my camp where there were many IMs and GMs training. When he met all these GMs, and played many games with these players, he was calculating at par with them. He was as strong as them. That realisation also probably gave him an extra boost and some confidence,” Shyamsundar said.
“Over the past one year, he has been working very hard on chess. Because sometimes he used to be playful and joyful. But now you can see he is fully focused,” he added.
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A couple of months back, Shyamsundar was standing next to Raahul VS’s board watching him compete in a game at the Dubai Open when a blunder from the youngster made his jaw drop. Later, the move earned Raahul an elder-brotherly rebuke from Shyamsundar: “Arre bhai what are you doing?”
As Shyamsundar points out, Raahul had gotten into the habit of making game-turning one-move blunders.
“He is very good at tactical chess. He’s good at tactics. He is good at calculation also. But, his major problem for all these years was, he would make silly one-move blunders. I told him a few times that this is happening very frequently. Even before he came to me (for the camp), I just told him this as casual advice. If you play well for four hours and then squander it away on one silly blunder that too a beginner’s blunder that will always leave a negative impact. But over the last few months, it has reduced quite a lot, drastically.”
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