India's chess GMs: 100 and counting – Why becoming a GM is now just a tiny step

L-R: India's first and 100th GMs - Viswanathan Anand and Anuj Shrivatri.

When Viswanathan Anand became a Grandmaster in Coimbatore in 1988, attaining that step used to be a giant step towards professional chess. Now, it’s a footnote. India completing a century of GMs on Sunday — with Anuj Shrivatri being the latest one with a win at the ASEAN Plus in the Philippines on Sunday — should be viewed accordingly.Though FIDE has lowered the regulations to attain a GM title, the players still have to find shortcuts and easier paths to add the accolade to their CV. These include pulling out, withdrawing and reentering from the pairings of the same tournament multiple times, withdrawing from one tournament in one city and travelling to the other city the next day. All this to protect an Elo drop in a bid to reach Elo 2500. Or playing soft tournaments in Europe.

Becoming a GM is still a task, though, and further progress is even more difficult. Frequent and lucrative tournaments are available only for players above Elo 2650. If you don’t reach Elo 2550 by age 17, that final push is improbable. Though becoming a GM before age 18 is possible, it’s a full-time endeavour with escalating costs and entails huge compromises on academics and social life.Only 51 of India’s GMs have maintained a rating of more than Elo 2500.

India’s current rating spread of GMs is from Elo 2763 (Pragg) to Elo 2222 (Saptarshi Roy Choudhary). There are nine GMs in India aged 15-25 who are below the minimum GM rating of Elo 2500, with the lowest being Prithu Gupta at 2398, the India No. 142 and not among 3,000 best players in the world.When Anand became a GM there were less than 200 active GMs rated above Elo 2500, now there are about 550. And if we count GMs who have slipped below Elo 2500, there are about 750 more GMs the world over.

The situation is dramatically better for women who manage to attain GM title after hardships including social and emotional challenges.“Generally, the players have to pay huge amounts as coaching fees and most of the GMs today are unemployed or unsponsored. There are many others who spend these types of funds but never ever cross the rating of Elo 1900. Private sponsors and funding for coaching is very small in number compared to the aspirants trying to get titles in India,” Pravin Thipsay, former seven-time National champion and coach, told TOI.

“It’s sad that unlike the Soviet Chess Federation or the Russian Chess Federation or Chinese Chess Federation, the AICF has not attempted to create a system wherein the GMs and other merited players would be absorbed for training assignments or for any other form of services by which a player could get reasonable financial benefits,” he added.