Chennai to host Chess Olympiad; Born at the height of the Cold War amid the Boris Spassky vs Bobby Fischer title match, the then Soviet Cultural Center club has a history of fueling Chennai’s chess revolution.
Sandip G
The check-mates: A month before the 1972 world championship match between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky in Reykjavík, considered the greatest chess match of the century, the then House of Soviet Cultural Center in Madras, India’s only international master, Manuel Aronaire, started a chess club in India. approached. Aaron had no second thoughts. Shortly before Spassky admitted defeat to Fischer over the phone, Aron, who changed the world’s chess dynamics, had its first formal chess club in the library of the Madras Soviet Centre.
If Fischer’s victory led to a chess boom in the hitherto apathetic United States, it sparked a chess revolution in Chennai as well, laying the foundation for its emergence as the country’s chess nursery.
Also Read: Chess Olympiad Round 2 – Pragnananda, Carlson win
Aaron, now 86, describes how the Soviet-American Cold War spread across the chessboard and reached the Tamil Nadu capital at the time. And, “There were so many layers to the tournament that even people who didn’t follow chess started talking about it. The match was keenly watched despite the lack of streaming or television coverage in those days. We were waiting for information from the authorities of the cultural centre,” he adds.
The Chess Club is named after Aaron’s favorite Soviet player, Mikhail Thal, whom he met at the Chess Olympiad. Aaron says the center provided him with all the infrastructure, including chess blocks, boards, books and magazines such as Shachmatny Bulletin, Chess in the USSR and 64.
Accessing Soviet journals through the Russian Chess Center, Aaron translated them into English and made them available to other chess players. “Western publications are expensive, Russian publications are free. “I thought it would be useful to have chess literature available to the next generation,” says Aaron.
Annual Maintenance Rs. With a hefty fee of 4, the club soon prospered as a separate smaller complex was built on the premises. Serious, semi-serious and recreational players have spent countless hours here playing intense games.
Aaron, meanwhile, looked for a young player who could become a world champion. “I would tell my friends that given the right opportunities, I can produce the country’s first world champion in 15 years. “I looked for that spark in every young player that came into the club,” he says.
Three years later, a five-year-old boy with big, round eyes and curly hair came to the temple. It was Viswanathan Anand, and Aaron spotted him immediately. “He had something, you knew he had a special talent,” she says.
A couple of years later, Anand moved to the Philippines where his father worked. By the time he returned to the club two years later, he had grown fast, befitting his age. “He had a tremendous blitz game and I don’t remember him losing. The funny rule is that whoever loses has to get up from their chair. Anand never woke up,” says Aaron.
At times international grandmasters such as Yuri Averbach, Vladimir Bagirov and Evgeny Pepchuk visited the club to play. This helped in the development of early chess enthusiasts like Anand.
A real breakthrough came in 1983 when 14-year-old Anand defeated Aaron in a classical game. Four years later, he became the country’s first Grandmaster. That one moment changed the history of Indian chess.
A few years later, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Tal Chess Club had to close because the now-named Russian Cultural Center began demanding huge rents.
But by then, chess culture was already flourishing in the city of Chennai, new clubs were springing up, the state association was organizing more tournaments, and Anand was a popular figure in the city. “He inspired a generation of us to play chess. We were all his fans, following his every game and analyzing his every move,” recalls RB Ramesh, one of Tamil Nadu’s 23 grandmasters after Anand.
Over the next two decades, Anand became world champion (in 2000), world No. 1 (2007), reclaimed the lost crown (2007), and defended it three times fiercely before Magnus Carlsen dethroned him. “Everything about him is inspiring, especially the way he guides youngsters, grooms them and plays with them,” says Ramesh.
Among the players carrying forward the legacy of Chennai chess are D Gukesh and R Pragnananda, both 16-year-olds, both grandmasters, the fastest and second-fastest Indians to meet the GM norms.
You can model the chess family tree as follows — Aaron at the top, Anand next, both alone, before branching out, K. Sasikaran and RB Ramesh, next P. Atipan and SB Sethuraman, then Gukesh and Pragnananda.
Here are the roots of chess, set against the backdrop of a nearly two-month-long proxy war on the chessboard in Reykjavik, Iceland, in the former library of the Soviet Cultural Center, born at the height of the Cold War.
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