By Our Special Correspondent
Viswanathan Anand firmly believes that India has enough talent to produce the next Chess World Champion but not before 2025 since there is no “quicker pathway” and the process to create one will take that much time.
Anand began to groom and mentor the next batch of chess whizkids at his Westbridge Anand Chess Academy (WACA) after COVID-19 induced first lockdown in 2020.
Six of India’s Gen-Next talents — Nihal Sarin, R Praggnanandhaa, Raunak Sadhwani, D Gukesh and R Vaishali and Arjun Erigiasi were inducted — when WACA came into being in December 2020.
“If you want the formal title it will be earliest in 2025. There is no quicker pathway, which gives us plenty of time to get ready but there are a lot of details in that,” Anand told PTI in a virtual interaction on Wednesday.
With Magnus Carlsen refusing to defend his title, the 2023 World Championship will be between the top two finishers of the Candidates and it is from the next cycle only, that the likes of Gukesh and Praggu can vie for the honors.
“The world championship cycle, let’s see what shape it will take in the next 1-2 years and so on. But the World Championship is just an icing on the cake. We should be aiming for the cake, by just getting stronger, making progress.
“If you are strong enough then you are ready for whatever turns up there, that’s my attitude. It will be very hard to predict what shape of things the chess world is changing very fast these days,” he added.
“I saw it as an opportunity to play chess and be ready for bigger tournaments when they happen. Praggu and Nihal were just above ELO rating 2600 at that stage. Arjun, Gukesh along with Raunak were rated at 2500-something.
“Very soon everyone’s rating graph took off; they started having very successful results. We were running ahead of targets, at that stage we spoke of 2615 and how to get there and so on. Everyone was crossing that quite fast.
“Now we have Gukesh, Arjun who have 2700-plus rating. Praggu has mainly beaten Magnus five times, biggest of the standard achievements. He’s been doing very well and also very close to 2700 now. It’s been very good progress,” Anand said.
“It’s just playing one-two good tournaments a year because if I don’t play often enough then I forget what practical chess is like… It’s important to have at least familiarity and try to play well, to keep my level. I would say that’s where I’m right now,” he concluded. PTI
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