Leon Mendonca, the Goan chess whiz known for Hawaiian shirts, attacking chess and appetite for big scalps

For Leon, who became India’s 67th Grandmaster in 2020, moments under the bright arc lights on the global stage have been limited. His rise, after all, coincided with India discovering its golden generation with stars like world champion D Gukesh, R Praggnanandhaa and Arjun Erigaisi.

Unlike a Gukesh or a Pragg, who hail from chess-loving Chennai, Leon took his first steps in the sport in the small town of Saligao in Goa. But his rise is also testament to the fact that the sport is spreading fast in India, at outposts away from the traditional centres. Before Leon, Goa had one more Grandmaster — Anurag Mhamal.

“There was no culture of chess in Goa compared to a city like Chennai when I started out at the age of six. My first breakthrough was when I won a bronze medal in the World Youth Championship back in 2014 when I was eight. That’s when my parents had to make some big decisions. My dad left his job to travel with me for tournaments. That was not a simple decision,” Leon told The Indian Express.

The increasingly popular ‘freestyle’ format of chess is the modern-day version of the sport that encourages players to be intuitive and sharp. “This variant is the best thing, this is the future of chess. This forces players to focus on their own skills rather than memorising opening theory,” Leon would say after his win over Nepomniachtchi.

Close look at the games he played at the tournament gives an idea about Leon’s stunning show. Nepomniachtchi held an advantage of 114 rating points on the Indian and was yet forced to resign in 36 moves. In the next round, Richard Rapport, rated 79 rating points ahead of Leon, was handed defeat in 35 moves. In his nine games, he lost just once.

Leon’s first motivation to play the sport was not too different from the greatest chess player ever — the Norwegian star Magnus Carlsen. They both wanted to beat their elder sisters. “His sister Beverly was first given a chess set as a gift, that’s when we sent her to a class to get coaching. She would then teach Leon, who was just around four or five at that time, what she had learnt at the class that day. That’s how he started,” said father Lyndon.

Even as his sister soon moved on to other pursuits, Leon was so enamoured by the sport that he would often play against himself at home.

While chess players, particularly teenage prodigies, are known to be singularly passionate about their sport at the cost of everything else, Leon found a second passion in playing the violin, an instrument he plays so well that when he was stuck in Budapest for over a year at the peak of the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, he actually joined the choir at a Budapest church. His father Lyndon loves to tell the tale of how he managed to get a second-hand violin for Leon at the height of the pandemic in Budapest in exchange for Leon giving the previous owner chess lessons.

“I guess it’s a cultural thing for Goans, we usually learn a musical instrument as a child, be it piano, violin or something else. So I also learnt violin as a kid and loved it,” said Leon.

Back when he started to become good at the sport, Leon’s biggest challenge was getting top-quality coaching in Goa, said Lyndon. So father and son took the road, chasing elite chess knowledge around the country. They lived with famous coach Akash Thakur in Nagpur for a while, where his basics were strengthened. With online chess coaching still not a thing back in those days, there were also other stints with other trainers — Rajesh Bahadur in Madhya Pradesh and Shashikant Kutwal in Pune.

“Because at some point, we realised that we had to move on (from Goa). So, we started going to neighboring states like Maharashtra, Karnataka and then Tamil Nadu,” said Lyndon.

Around 2015, when Leon started to show serious potential, they approached Grandmaster R B Ramesh to be his coach. Ramesh has shaped the careers of many elite players like Praggnanandhaa, Vaishali and Aravindh Chitambaram. But it meant plenty of days spent in Chennai to learn at one of the country’s premier finishing institutes in chess: Ramesh’s Chess Gurukul. Both father and son moved to Chennai, and Leon joined the famous Vellamal school in Chennai that counts Gukesh and Pragg among its students.

READ: Meet Leon Luke Mendonca, the bespectacled smiling assassin of the 64 squares, who took the Grenke Freestyle Chess event by storm

Currently, Leon is being mentored by Vishnu Prasanna, the man who shaped the career of Gukesh, who last year became the world’s youngest world champion in chess history.

Leon also benefited from being part of the first cohort of students at the Westbridge Anand Chess Academy, started by five-time world champion Viswanathan Anand.

Lyndon said what makes his son unique is that he never really complains about anything: no fuss about hotel rooms, no hissy fit over hectic travel itineraries, no rants about arbiters or tournament organisers. To illustrate this, he gives the example of the time both of them were stranded in Budapest for many months when the world shut down abruptly due to the pandemic.

Instead of going stir-crazy at being caught in a foreign land in one of the most uncertain times in living memory, Leon, accompanied by his father, chased his goals on the chess board, claiming the three norms that one needs to become a Grandmaster during the pandemic in the chess-revering cities.

“Raising Leon has always been a pleasure for me because he is very dedicated to whatever he does. He has come up the hard way. But with him, there are never any complaints. So, we never had issues even in those uncertain times, be it food or accommodation,” said Lyndon.