Four years into Soviet Union-style chess academy, Viswanathan Anand’s students shine bright: ‘Always available for them’

Other promising prodigies at Anand’s academy are Nihal Sarin, Raunak Sadhwani and Leon Luke Mendonca. Nihal, Raunak and Leon are — along with Praggnanandhaa and Gukesh — among the Top 10 ranked juniors in the world.

“The idea for the chess academy was to have a programme by which Indian youngsters carry the torch forward. I’m very happy that the first group we picked are all doing so well now. I’ll admit to being slightly surprised by how quickly they have done it,” Anand tells The Indian Express.

Anand is not the only mentor at hand at WACA: he has assembled a quartet of Grandmasters to help out with online classes.

Poland’s Grzegorz Gajewski helps the youngsters with opening theories, GM Sandipan Chanda sharpens mid-game prep, Russian GM Artur Yusupov polishes endgames and Boris Gelfand hosts mentoring sessions. While Yusupov holds four classes a month, the others usually have about two classes each month.

At times, Anand requests Gelfand to hold an extra class or a dedicated session right before players go in for an important tournament. In chess, getting a training session with top Grandmasters can be prohibitively expensive, which is where WACA fills in the gap.

The genesis of WACA lay in a question Anand was asked by his good friend Sandeep Singhal in 2019: what he would do for Indian chess whenever he gave up playing himself. Anand didn’t have an answer then. But a few months later, he returned with a concrete plan: a chess academy modelled on the lines of the legendary Botvinnik School of Chess and the Samford Fellowship. Thus, WACA came into being in December 2020 with Anand looking at the chess mentoring aspect and WestBridge Capital, of which Singhal is the co-founder, coming on board as the financial partner.

Anand has influenced many a prodigy’s decisions with what he calls ‘tailormade solutions’: from Gukesh hiring Polish GM Grzegorz Gajewski as his trainer to Vaishali working with GM Sandipan Chanda. (Express photo by Partha Paul)

It was at the Botvinnik Chess School in the erstwhile Soviet Union in the 1960s — spearheaded by world champion Mikhail Botvinnik — that Garry Kasparov and Vladimir Kramnik learnt the intricacies of the sport.

Anand has influenced many a prodigy’s decisions with what he calls ‘tailormade solutions’: from Gukesh hiring Polish GM Grzegorz Gajewski as his trainer to Vaishali working with GM Sandipan Chanda. Both Gajewski and Chanda have worked extensively with the five-time world champion during his playing days.

“I was the one who recommended Gajewski to Gukesh. Gajewski was my trainer for nine or so years. I recommended him at a stage of Gukesh’s career where I thought he will now need very serious work on his openings. My first input for Vaishali was that Sandipan (Chanda) was brilliant for me at some point in my career when I really needed him. He gave me some amazing ideas. So I told her, ‘Why don’t you have a couple of training sessions with him?’”

Anand is keen to clarify that the counsel he provides to players are just suggestions or nudges. He also tries to get them to visualise tournament scenarios. He has had these conversations with all three Candidates contenders from WACA: Pragg, Vaishali and Gukesh.

“My thing is to counsel them. I am always available for them to bounce off ideas. I don’t dictate anything, but I am available for consultations,” says Anand.

So what’s the next step for WACA? “We will keep being a resource that Indian chess can benefit from. But we will also react to events: If something dramatic happens now (at the Candidates), then that will take a lot of our focus.”

BONUS: Can you think like a teenaged grandmaster?

Take a look at the position below from a famous game and predict the next move of white (Answer and interactive below).

Did you figure it out?

You can now retrace that whole game with the interactive below: