Queen Koneru Humpy: At home with the women’s world rapid champion

Playing in New York in a strong field of 110 women, she made it through the event battling jet lag that would see her waking up at unearthly hours, much like an irritating alarm clock without a snooze button. She slumped to a defeat in the first round of the World Rapid Championship, losing on time despite having a slightly better position on the board.

Then, came the comeback. With nothing going her way, Humpy fought. Humpy won.

It’s this quality of hers that her father and first coach Ashok greatly admires.

“As a youngster, I was very ambitious. I never used to agree for draws. There are several games where I rejected a draw, pressed too hard and then lost,” Humpy elaborates.

In the evenings, Koneru Humpy spends time with her daughter Ahana. (Express Photo: Amit Kamath)

“Nowadays, in my opinion, she is less aggressive. I want to see her at her best: as an aggressive player. She never compromised for a draw (when she was young). Always fought for a win. That’s what I want to see,” says Ashok, who played that same brand of never-say-die chess as a state-level player.

In the family, Ashok is the true chess obsessive.

“He plays online chess every day from morning to evening. There will be days when I don’t see chess at all. But he does not miss playing chess even for a single day,” says Humpy about her father. “He traveled with me until 2011, we used to work together. Then from 2011, I started preparing on my own. But he still gives me guidance.”

At the World Rapid Championship, that guidance from Ashok came in the form of some out-of-the-box advice: train without using a chess engine, watch videos of past world champions, play plenty of online games and solve puzzles.

‘You are my pride, mom’

Here in her comfy apartment in a luxurious high-rise complex on the Chennai-Vijayawada Highway, Humpy has created an idyllic cocoon for herself. Her parents live in the same apartment complex. Her in-laws live not too far away. Both sets of parents help with her daughter Ahana when Humpy is abroad playing in events.

Unlike most other elite players who struggle to switch off from the sport, Humpy’s life has a harmonious balance.

“My chess ends when I finish a tournament. And then chess only happens when I am practising in my room or talking to my dad. That’s when chess happens. Otherwise, chess doesn’t occur in my life at all. I wanted to be like that. I wanted to separate the two things. I don’t take the stress from the board into my home,” says Humpy.

After three decades of playing the sport, the 37-year-old’s life is neatly compartmentalised in two aspects. First, is her chess career. Ashok, who wields considerable influence over her on the board, is the patron saint of this aspect. When Humpy plays in international tournaments, Ashok is the only one at home who tracks the event diligently.

The second compartment is her family life. This is the part which husband Anvesh and daughter Ahana inhabit. Aged seven, roughly the age at which Humpy dived headlong into the rabbit hole called chess, Ahana has very limited interest in the sport. When Humpy returns from tournaments, she can expect Ahana to pop up at the airport to ask if she won. At the World Rapid Championship, with New York being half an earth’s spin away, Humpy and Ahana never spoke on the phone until the World Rapid title was won. Then, when she returned to India, Ahana greeted her with a handwritten card.

“You are my pride, mom. You are my greatest motivation. You are an inspiration to me. Your devotion, hard work, love and faith inspire me to do more, learn more and to reach my goals. I love you mom,” wrote Ahana with pencil.

The handwritten card that Koneru Humpy’s daughter Ahana welcomed her with when she returned from the World Rapid Championship.

These twin forces take charge of Humpy’s daily life almost by appointment: the first half of the day is usually reserved for chess; the second half is all about the family. If she gets the competitive fire from her father, her husband and daughter provide emotional sustenance.

Humpy’s days in Vijayawada start early, with an hour-long session in the gym starting from 7 or 7.30 am. Then she trains from 9.30 or 10. A little break around 1.30 follows before she’s back training from 3 pm. It’s not a very elaborate setting either — “Just a laptop and me,” she says.

Finally, when her daughter returns from school around 4.45 pm, Humpy spends as much of it as she can with Ahana, helping her with homework or going for walks to the park.

“When there is a tournament coming up, I train for five to six hours minimum. But when there’s nothing coming, I am not very particular that I have to train everyday. I train based on what’s happening with Ahana,” says Humpy.

A lot of her own childhood was spent blissfully commanding a wooden chess army on the battlefield of 64 squares with her father watching every move with pride. Now she’s determined to spend as much time as possible chasing another kind of bliss, with her partner and daughter.

Anvesh, a businessman who accompanied Humpy once to a tournament, admits he doesn’t follow the sport too much.

“Ahana knows more (about chess) than him,” Ashok good-naturedly chides his son-in-law. Everyone heartily guffaws at this.

Family members of many elite grandmasters don’t necessarily learn the sport itself, but they get pretty good at interpreting body language cues. Over time they figure out when to steer clear, especially after a particularly bruising defeat.

Humpy’s husband says she’s always the same, with rarely any of her chess mood spilling over at home. There is no glowering athlete that necessitates family members gingerly tiptoeing around her.

“One thing about her is that she always likes to spend time with family. Even if she’s not done well, she likes to have the company of the family around. Of course angry thoughts will come up, but after having played for more than three decades, she is very mature about her feelings. She will never show that anger to the family,” says Anvesh.

Anvesh paints a picture of Humpy at home as a bit of a ‘perfectionist’. Humpy says she cooks rarely, but when she does, she’s determined to get it right. If she’s making biryani, she chuckles, she starts watching as many videos of it as possible the night before.

Away from the board, Humpy says she enjoys watching movies. But post-pandemic, visits to the theatre have reduced while they do movie nights at home via OTT platforms.

“Movies are mostly on weekends. Ahana prefers to watch cartoons. So we give her priority in the evenings,” says Humpy.

Koneru Humpy with her father Ashok at her home. (Express Photo: Amit Kamath)

No sponsor, no second

Twice last year, Humpy felt she was ready to walk away from the sport after particularly bruising performances. Both occasions were after bad tournaments: she was second from last at the Norway Chess event and last in the Tata Steel Rapid Championship in Kolkata.

But after every such setback, when she felt she couldn’t do it anymore, an overwhelming sentiment would prevail — not like this, not because of a defeat.

“I’m fine to quit the sport anytime if I feel like I’m not performing as per my expectations. But I didn’t want to quit only because I lost the tournament. I wanted to make it a point that I still have that quality of a champion. I wanted to prove that. And somewhere inside me, this triggered me and probably that was one of the reasons for me to sustain for such a long period,” says Humpy.

She points to being in a similar frame of mind in 2018, when she was making a comeback after a sustained break due to pregnancy.

“Sometime around 2018, after I came back from the break, I played at events like the Chess Olympiad and the World Knockout Championship. In the World Knockout, I lost in the second round. I was very upset. At that time, my daughter was just a year old. I was wondering if I will ever be able to come back to my best form.”

At that stage of her life, support came from her parents and Anvesh, who egged her on.

Right after that, she won her first World Rapid title.

The greatest female chess player from India does not have a trainer or a second (a strong grandmaster who helps with preparation) at the moment. Nor does she have a corporate sponsor. She has been helped by ONGC since 2006, but besides that, there are no sponsors. She says she hired her first second when she competed in the World Women’s Championship in 2011. But since then, she only occasionally takes help from seconds.

This takes the father-daughter duo back to her childhood, when, despite the fact that she was the world’s youngest woman to become a grandmaster (at the age of 15 in 2002), sponsorships were hard to come by.

“In fact, before I became a grandmaster I had sponsorship from a bank. Then they withdrew my sponsorship and started sponsoring a cricketer,” says Humpy.

Ashok wrote to corporates asking for sponsorship, but none came. He kept the rejection letters that came from sponsors. They were all politely worded, but the whiff of rejection was unmistakable.

Humpy last went to school in Class 4, but by Class 7, she quit studies. Now she gets invited to events at universities as the chief guest.

“I believe that you should always do whatever you are passionate about. I don’t wonder at all (what studying would have been like). But I do miss the experience of enjoying with friends and all these things. But if you want to be a professional, you have to sacrifice something. Now I wait for my daughter to come home from school and I listen to all the conversations that she has at school with her friends. That’s fun!”

Ashok’s first plan for Humpy was to make her a tennis player, like his own father, who was a club-level player.

“I learnt chess from my father. He used to play both tennis and chess. When the Williams sisters were making a mark in the world, I observed that there is a lot of money in tennis. That’s why I wanted her to play tennis. But she was attracted to chess while I was studying the game. I myself started playing chess because of Bobby Fischer. I followed that Boris Spassky versus Fischer match closely on the radio. When Humpy started playing, I thought I could make her like Judit Polgar (the Hungarian chess grandmaster who is the strongest woman chess player of all time),” reveals Ashok. “So the first thing I told her was to beat my father. He was a club-level chess player, but she beat him by the age of eight. After that, I played against her. I was a tournament-level player. By the age of 11 she was able to beat me.”

Those early games would see Ashok give his daughter a deliberate advantage on the board to get her to beat him.

“I wanted her to learn how to exploit those weaknesses,” he says before declaring proudly, “After some months, she didn’t need those chances also.”