Black knight leaps, white king flees: Inside India’s chess boom, where silent halls battle roaring screens

Fireworks lit up the Mumbai sky. Champagne corks popped and crowds roared their approval as six players appeared on the balcony of the Royal Opera House.

These were the grandmasters of the Alpine Pipers, which had won the Tech Mahindra Global Chess League (GCL) 2025. Led by American Grandmaster Fabiano Caruana and backed by top Indian talent R Praggnanandhaa, they prevailed over a league that features stars like Viswanathan Anand and Alireza Firouzja.

“The league has come home,” says Gourav Rakshit, commissioner of this year’s league, on hosting it in India after earlier editions in London and Dubai. Veteran chess columnist Leonard Barden wrote in the Financial Times, London, “After the IPL, this is arguably India’s most ambitious attempt to export a sports format,” adding that GCL, backed by industrialist Anand Mahindra, tries “to convert the digital fan numbers of the chess boom into a sustainable league model”.


Rakshit says he wants to bring “the energy of a live sport” to chess. Before GCL, which ran from December 13 to 24, there was the FIDE World Cup in Goa, showing that hosting top-level chess events has become the norm in India. And in January, the Tata Steel rapid chess tournament kicks off in Kolkata, in the spanking new Dhano Dhanyo Auditorium, featuring Anand playing a solo event after a long gap. Does it really matter where an event is hosted?

Especially now when the audience is overwhelmingly online, as chess seems readymade for the internet, both to play and to watch. Since the pandemic, apps like chess.com have exploded, with over 200 million users. Much like what happened to computer games, people are tuning in to watch players duke it out, opening new revenue models for streamers and content creators.

World No. 3 Hikaru Nakamura is also a top streamer with up to 80,000 people watching him play offhand games. Similarly, multiple camera angles, heart rate monitors, graphic displays and audio commentary have made chess tournaments a thrilling spectacle. Innovations like the “eval bar”, a rectangle that sits on the side of the board and uses computer analysis to show who is winning, mean even amateurs can follow games without having to do analysis on their own.

In such a world, does chess really need to be watched at a venue? I look for a typical “live” experience of a chess event at the finals of the World Cup in Goa.

WATCH THE MOVES

To the uninitiated, it is four men locked in a room for six hours, who spend it alternatively staring at the board and at each other, all in absolute silence. To chess fans, it is cerebral Olympus. I count 12 spectators in the hall. In contrast, there were around 90,000 people at the final of the FIFA World Cup in Qatar. Many sports have their iconic venues, with a terroir made of history, playing conditions and audience; think of the Gabba or Wimbledon. The contrast could not be more black and white, as I watch the games unfold in what is essentially a gussied-up function hall at a hotel near Baga Beach.

I surrender my phone at the entrance, and a volunteer holds up a “Keep Silence” board as I walk in. Only the front row is occupied with a handful of spectators. The arbiters carefully adjust the peacockshaped Viswanathan Anand Trophy. There are four players at two boards on the stage. The organisers have arranged for sport stars to make the ceremonial first move for each match, with Abhinav Bindra and Saina Nehwal doing the honours. In an adjacent pressroom, Bindra has just spent some time with journos. One of them tells me the venue was jampacked earlier on, but with no Indian making it to the final four, local media interest has plummeted. Another complains as he asks about the spelling of the Uzbek GM Javokhir Sindarov: “Abhi abhi maine Nepo (Ian Nepomniachtchi) or Pragg (Pragg-nanandhaa) ka naam likhna seekha (I have just learnt how to spell Nepo and Pragg).”

Instead, we have two Uzbeks, a Chinese and a Russian facing off. At stake is not just the cup, but also qualification for the Candidates tournament next year. The winner of that will earn the right to face off against D Gukesh for the ultimate prize. The format has been designed by a sadist. After almost a month of play, the original 206 players have become 4. However, only three will qualify for the Candidates.

That is the real prize, though the winner’s purse of $120,000 isn’t chump change. The format means that the top two finalists —Wei Yi vs Sindarov—have already qualified, and the losers’ bracket for the third place, featuring Andrey Esipenko vs Nodirbek Yakubboev, takes on extreme importance. All four are in their early 20s. Behind them, giant video screens show the board and the players.

A few moves ago, in the pressroom, I was watching this unfold on a YouTube channel, where commentators constantly suggest moves, based on computer programs (known as “engines”). Within seconds, the true nature of the positions is laid bare.

PLAYERS AND VIEWERS

Here, there is no such thing. It is almost meditative, no phone, no engine, everyone raptly gazing at the players. Unlike the close-up cameras of the video feed, here we are around 30 feet away. This paradoxically brings us closer to the action. I realise that each player is a catalogue of nervous tics and mannerisms. Sindarov fidgets with a pawn while Esipenko plays with a rosary in his hands.

Wei doesn’t look at the board but stares into space, as pieces move and drop in lightning speed inside the hall of his mind. When it’s not their turn to play, players leave the board—almost like a kathakali performance, so choreographed are their movements. While one player is thinking, the other gets up and strolls around. Every now and then, they crack open a bottle of water and drain it in one gulp.

One of these four will have the worst day of his life, the loser of the loser’s bracket. As Bindra would tell us in the pressroom:

“I wasted a hell of a lot of money on psychologists and trainers but was really never able to get a breakthrough.” It was only later that “I started accepting pressure and the expectations around my journey”. I decide to focus on the third-place match as it is the one with the most drama.

The silence in such a large hall is unnerving, seemingly magnifying everything, stretching each moment. If Esipenko wins or draws, then he enters chess history by becoming a candidate. In the front row I notice India’s second grandmaster, Dibyendu Barua, watching. In 1993 in Switzerland, he had a crucial game against Judit Polgar, where he might have qualified for the Candidates, ahead of Anand.

But he went down in a violent clash in the King’s Gambit, never again to reach such heights. Yakubboev is trailing in the match and is in a must-win situation and he has the calm of a kamikaze pilot sending his plane on that final dive. Earlier, Esipenko had offered a whole rook as sacrifice, but if taken then Yakubboev’s queen would have been trapped. After almost half an hour of thinking, Esipenko makes his move, sending his queen deep into enemy territory. I fail to see why he thought for so long.

Soon things tense up. Yakubboev is hunched up, tense, as he builds up his attack on enemy king. It’s now or never. His hand darts out to move a piece, but his brain a second later recalls it, the flesh willing but spirit intervening. He retracts his hand and again thinks. Each side is squeezing their brains for one last effort. After a month, they are near the breaking point. Yakubboev is down to one minute for a move, trying to desperately calculate but senses it is all slipping away.

I think of Vladimir Nabokov’s The Luzhin Defence, “Luzhin’s thought roamed through entrancing and terrible labyrinths, meeting, now and then, the anxious thought of Turati, who sought the same thing as he. Both realized simultaneously that white was not destined to develop his scheme any further; that he was on the brink of losing rhythm….” Then a black knight leaps deep into the white territory.

There is a stir in the hall, a faint susurrus, equivalent to a vuvuzela in cricket, or a Mexican wave in football. Yakubboev seems to grimace and shake his head. After several minutes, the conception slowly dawns on me. Esipenko’s black rook will sweep down, threatening imminent checkmate. I now know why he spent half an hour thinking; he must have seen all these moves ahead. The white king attempts to flee but it is too late. There is no escape, and with that Yakubboev stops the clock and extends his hand.

They exchange a few words on the mighthaves even as applause sweeps the hall. I get up, exhausted by the two hours of trying to keep pace with the Grandmaster mind.

ONLINE/OFFLINE

I later run into Sagar Shah, the genial founder of ChessBase India, a popular portal for the sport. Shah’s enthusiastic brand of commentary, reminiscent of Latin American football commentators yelling for goal, has livened up the staid mores of chess broadcast. He explains they had, at the peak, 24,000 live viewers for the finals.

Indian GM Arjun Erigaisi’s presence in the quarterfinal gave a fillip to numbers. “As long as an Indian was there, we had 250,000-300,000 viewers for every stream,” says Shah. For the final, “It was 70,00-100,000.” While watching the stream on your phone is convenient, the intangible experience of seeing your favourites in the flesh has its own aura. Every day, as the players step out of the hall, they are mobbed by children wanting autographs. I talk to Vineet Prabhu, who has come down from Mumbai with his 12-year-old son Arjun. Prabhu, who works in IT, has paid `3,500 per head for a pass.

“And we all loved it,” he says. His son is prowling around, looking to get selfies and autographs. I talk to Arjun, who has an official rating. I ask him about the atmosphere inside the hall, “I’m used to the silence, I myself play six-hour games,” he says confidently. For him, these games are also instructional. “I learnt a lot from the final game,” he says after Sindarov beat Wei, talking about the Uzbek player’s “calmness and persistence” in a complex position. Prabhu adds: “We need these kinds of events for kids. It also becomes a cultural event where foreign players can learn about India.”

Another fan has come all the way from Australia because her kids are into chess. “It was surreal to see in real life,” she says. Her children managed to meet Sindarov at the pool between games, “He is so friendly and well spoken—made fans everywhere,” she says. While a live match is a treat for spectators, I wonder if venues matter for players.

PLACE VALUE

The next day, I talk to Anand; the previous evening he had handed over the Anand Trophy, which he describes as “surreal and cool”, to the winner, Sindarov. “Yes, you have strong associations with venues,” he says. I’d seen him in action from Moscow to Dubai. At Wijk aan Zee in the Netherlands in January, with fierce gales blowing from the North Sea, you can rub shoulders with the world’s chess elite at the only doner place that is open till late. It is also where the bartender in the local bar asks you, how did the game go today?

Anand says, “I always associated Wijk aan Zee with winter. And because I didn’t have a single really bad result in Wijk, over the years, it just became something very positive to look forward to.”

He quantifies venues by how he performed there: “In tournaments where I had one or two bad results, I needed one or two good results to change that vibe.” He says he didn’t think much of Dortmund after “I had one disastrous result in 2001 and I started off badly in 2003 but once I won three games I felt much better. So you can overcome certain feelings as well”. Does a venue have a vibe?

Anand recalls the Amber tournaments in Monaco: “That was something to look forward to because you know they would pamper you silly. They had fun activities like excursions on rest days and things like that.”

SILENCE IS BROKEN

Two weeks later, the caravan moves on to Mumbai. And it is a step up from the old-school vibe of Goa. I talk to Rakshit over the phone. He goes over the features: “We have redesigned the arena to bring the audience as close to the action as possible, including transparent player booths that allow spectators to see the expressions, tension and intensity on the players’ faces without disturbing the game.”

The killer app in my opinion is the ability to listen to commentary while also watching live. Goa was a glimpse of the past. Rakshit says, “At the league in Mumbai, we are introducing headphonebased live commentary inside the venue, which provides fans with realtime, tactical explanations and behind-thescenes insights directly in their ears.”

As I watch the live feed of the league, the camera occasionally pans over the viewers who are sitting in plush, movie-theatre like seats and wave as they see themselves on the giant screen. Unlike the hours I spent watching the grandmasters work out the moves in Goa, this is very much the T20 version. At the Global Chess League, each player gets just 20 minutes and the game ends in less than an hour.

Rakshit says, “Traditional chess is beautiful, but it can be slow for modern audiences.”

I think of the evening after the tournament in Goa. As I sample a mango cider at a trendy microbrewery, I chat with the brewmaster. When I tell him I write about chess, he mentions a Russian grandmaster with an air of familiarity. He says a group of Russian grandmasters “would come here every night and get plastered”. I express my surprise that this was happening during the event.

He had put the same question to them and they told him: “We drink just to stop thinking.” Some things are still best experienced offline.

(Unudurti is a writer and chess enthusiast)