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Viswanathan Anand is creating an academy of grandmasters
Summary
Anand nurtures promising players by fitting into their existing schedule and adding a layer of expertise
One of the things that has surprised Viswanathan Anand about young chess players now is they order everything, including food, online. As a touring chess pro for about four decades, he looked forward to going out at meal times during competitions, which provided a relief from the intensity of being bent over a chess board for hours.
“But it’s a different generation (now)," he says, smiling over a video call from Chennai. “I would have a carefully drawn a map of the interesting places I could eat at. Now, they get food deliveries even from the neighbouring town."
The emblematic symbol of chess in India, now 54 years old, has in recent times segued into multiple roles as his playing days continue to become fewer. One of them is as the deputy president of the International Chess Federation (FIDE); the other is as a mentor to the next gen of Indian players.
The latter has come through the WestBridge Anand Chess Academy or WACA (not to be confused with Perth’s cricket ground), which started four years ago. The project came about serendipitously, says Sandeep Singhal, the co-founder and managing partner of investment firm WestBridge Capital, which has over $7 billion in assets under management.
When Anand, invited to talk to their investors pre-pandemic, was leaving the meeting, Singhal asked if they could contribute to chess. Anand said he would think about it and when he got back to Singhal, it was with the idea for WACA.
Anand had some inspiration from the Russian grandmaster Mikhail Botvinnik, whose influence in structuring chess as a sport in the erstwhile Soviet Union created a generation of superstars, including Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov. The Samford Fellowship in the US, given to promising players for the last four decades, was the other motivation; so WACA decided to combine the two.
The academy launched in late 2020, delayed due to the pandemic, as a fully online collective with the aim of selecting the most promising youngsters (rather than them applying for it). “The idea was to help them jump from being a youngster with a lot of promise or from being one of the best juniors in the world, to being one of the best players in the world," says Anand, the WACA co-founder with Singhal.
Five players, Nihal Sarin, R Praggnanandhaa, D. Gukesh, Raunak Sadhwani—all aged 14-16 then—and R. Vaishali, were part of the first batch, with Leon Mendonca joining in later. Most had become grandmasters in their early teens, except Vaishali, who was among the top women players in India. About 17 players varyingly use WACA’s services today.
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Mentors like grandmasters Sandipan Chanda, Grzegorz Gajewski, Artur Yusupov and Boris Gelfand provide essential tips to the players, who were too advanced to need basic coaching. WACA consciously fitted into the players’ existing set-ups, adding an extra layer of expertise using Anand’s experience.
“Technology is changing so fast, it’s difficult to say that this is what I did, this is what you should do," says Anand. “It’s more like, this is what I aim for, this is what you can aim for."
Gukesh was one of the players who made considerable progress. In the FIDE Chess Olympiad in 2022 in Chennai, he famously won eight out of eight games, including a win over Fabiano Caruana, currently the world’s second-highest rated player. Invitations for strong tournaments followed and Gukesh needed a team. Anand’s friend and former training partner Gajewski agreed to jump onboard, which helped the teenager two years later to qualify for the FIDE World Chess Championship 2024 by winning the Candidates tournament in April.
Anand believed before the start of the world championship that the 18-year-old Gukesh has the possibility of becoming the youngest-ever world champion, in the contest against Ding Liren, going on from 23 November to 13 December in Singapore.
“During this period leading up to the match, uncertainty, doubt, nerves, all these things slowly build up," says the five-time former world champion about what happens to a challenger in the days preceding the contest. “Nobody can be nervous all the time, but it’s sitting inside your head. The night before is special because the next day you start playing. There’s always a release of pressure once you start playing because you no longer have to dread something—it’s happening in front of you."
While the two WACA founders considered a physical space for the academy, it became clear soon enough that such a place was redundant. Since all the players were scattered across India and the coaches across the world, it was not practical to arrange meetings. Anand connects with the coaches to discuss the players’ progression, and in sharing his experience. “I am, obviously, sort of the public face of Indian chess, at least for a long time. I definitely see myself as a mentor though I’m not directly involved in coaching," Anand adds.
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Singhal, whose firm has committed ₹20-25 crore to the project with $1.5-2 million set aside for sponsorships including that of Gukesh, adds about Anand: “He’s got this great gift of saying the right words in the right way with a dry sense of humour. He knows when to step in a bit, when to step back. You can’t expect that from people who are at the top of their game. It’s hard for them to step down and help the next lot with that kind of meticulousness. His sharing of Gajewski with Gukesh is actually a perfect philanthropic gift."
Anand continues to play the sport sporadically, still rated among the world’s top 10, the third-highest Indian in FIDE ratings behind Arjun Erigaisi and Gukesh as of November. “I play a little bit less all the time and that’s a challenge in itself," he says smiling.
He does not see himself playing much more than he does currently. “I think the problem is, for many months in a year, I forget about playing chess and then I try to catch up," says Anand, who has been the face of Indian chess since the time he became a grandmaster in 1988 at age 19. “I’d like it to be a bit more streamlined, you know, good intentions and all that. But I cannot see my workload going up a lot. I will not play much more than this. That’s for sure."
While it might seem odd for Anand to “forget about playing chess", he clarifies that he thinks about the sport every day and follows it closely. “But there is something about working in a way that you are ready to play a game tomorrow or in a week from now… that need isn’t there and then eventually it slackens."
He remembers Pete Sampras, the multiple Grand Slam winner, saying that he was so ready to play tennis all the time but six months after he retired, he couldn’t think of playing at all. “It switches fast. I try to train and to catch up. There’s usually an intense two or three weeks where I try to switch to being a player again, some mysterious thing in the head," says Anand.
He sees this academy as part of his legacy. “I try to avoid saying that I’m a guru passing wisdom down the ages. It’s not that. It’s by direction."
What the academy has also achieved is it has made Anand more approachable to players who earlier may have been intimidated by him. Players are curious, want to hear a few stories and are able to meet informally. “I don’t know what, you’ll have to ask them what they see in me. I try to hang out with them, but I’m sometimes their parents’ age or slightly younger than their grandparents."
Arun Janardhan is a Mumbai-based journalist who covers sports, business leaders and lifestyle. He posts @iArunJ.
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