Gukesh Dommaraju: Why India is producing more chess champions
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Hi guys, it's Hannah Gelbart here. Welcome to this episode of What in the World from the BBC World Service. Today we're talking about chess because the World Chess Championship has been won by the youngest player ever. Gukesh Tomaraju is 18 and on Thursday he dramatically beat China's Ding Liren, the defending world champion, to the top. Once I was getting close I was getting nervous and I was not able to finish him off. And then all of a sudden I realised that I'm actually finishing the match right now and it

Now, Gukesh is one of India's chess prodigies. He started playing professionally when he was 10. He's talked about wanting to be world champion since he was 11, and he became a grandmaster at the age of 12.

All that is hugely impressive. And he's not the only teenage grandmaster from his city. Chennai in Tamil Nadu is known as India's chess capital. So today you're going to hear how India is producing so many chess champions and we're going to ask why world champions are getting younger.

Let's find out more now from Sarada V, a BBC journalist in Chennai. Hello. Hello. Hi. Thank you for joining us on the podcast. So tell me a bit about how Gugesh got to where he is today. How did he do it? It was a long journey for him.

what he had achieved today, he had said it was a dream that he had dreamt for almost 10 years. He was made to attend chess classes after school hours because his parents didn't want him to sit and wait till his father comes and picks him up in the school. So that's how it started. But very soon the trainers there were able to identify the interest and potential he had for chess.

And from there, he had other trainings and a lot of encouragement from parents and also from his school. Gugesh's parents, both of them are doctors. His father quit his profession when he realized that Gugesh was really interested in chess and that he needed his support. The school has a separate chess academy.

which has produced more than 10 grandmasters. And Gugesh is one of them. So they have exclusive training sessions. And he has been exempted from classes and examinations. Once he achieved the grandmaster title, and when he started representing the state and the country, there was government support as well. You mentioned he is a grandmaster. He became grandmaster at the age of 12, which is

astonishing. Now he's from Chennai, which is where you are in Tamil Nadu in India, and that is known as India's chess capital. What is it about Chennai that makes it so successful when it comes to chess? It has an interesting connection with the Soviet Union. The first chess club, the chess centre was started in the Soviet Cultural Centre, which was in Chennai in the 1970s.

That was the place where chess enthusiasts and chess players used to gather and play and talk and read about chess and all that. So that club was actually started by Mr. Manuel Aron, who's also from Chennai. And he was India's first international master. He won this title in 1962.

And this was the chess club where Vishwanathan Anand, who's a five-time world chess champion, again from Chennai, this is where he honed his skills in his early days. That inspired young kids coming into the play. Right now, that legacy is being carried on by not just Gugesh, we have so many other grandmasters. And Tamil Nadu has one-third of the

chess champions in the country are from Tamil Nadu, especially from Chennai. There was a chess Olympiad which was conducted a couple of years back, which was actually supposed to have taken place at Russia, but because of their political situations and the war they've entered into, they were not able to conduct the tournament and India and Tamil Nadu were quick enough to grab that opportunity and

And it was a big boost for all the chess lovers and the young kids here to get inspired and see all the international players come here and play. Is chess now part of the school curriculum? How old are children when they start to learn to play? They start learning chess even as young as they are when they are five or six years old.

There was a scheme introduced in 2013 called 7 to 17, aiming students from the age of 7 years to 17 years to get them involved in chess to catch them young. Because chess, as we know, as we've seen, that children become grandmasters at the age of 12. So they need a lot of practice and focus.

for at least seven or eight years before that. Schools themselves now, especially in the last couple of years, they have come forward and introduced it as part of their curriculum. They have their own trainers in their schools and they've started chess academies. And there are also a lot of other private chess academies where parents themselves go and enroll their kids. And why are parents encouraging their children to take up chess?

Parents prefer their children to get trained in chess rather than other sports. Chess, they think, is associated with their mind and calculation. There are academies where you can see parents who bring their children because they feel they are a bit struggling with their mathematics at school. It's also becoming an attractive career option for them. Saradet, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much. Thank you.

I want to step away from India for a moment to take a look at the global picture. Are chess champions also getting younger around the world? This is Giovanni Salla, a lecturer in psychology at the University of Liverpool here in the UK. Chess world champions are indeed getting younger. Historically, most world champions were in their late 20s or 30s, even in their 40s sometimes.

In the last 15-20 years, it has become increasingly common for chess players to achieve the title in their early 20s. Gukesh, the new world champion, is 18. This shift is largely due to better technology, in my opinion. Until a few decades ago, players studied chess using books and magazines. They had no internet and therefore no instant access to recently played games or newly developed chess theory.

When preparing for their legendary match in 1972, for example, Fischer and Spassky could not use AI-powered chess engines. Technology has massively increased the amount of information available to chess players. Those born since the 1990s have fully taken advantage of this technological revolution. And what are some of the reasons younger chess players might outperform older ones? Younger players often perform better in chess because they excel in two key cognitive skills:

Work in memory and processing speed. Work in memory is like a mental notepad. It helps players hold and manage information such as the current position, possible moves, and their outcomes. Processing speed is how quickly the brain can take in information, process it, and respond to it. These skills are crucial for efficiently evaluating positions and calculating moves.

especially under time pressure. As people age, these abilities tend to decline naturally, making it harder to handle the intense mental demands of high-level chess. Older players usually compensate with their experience and can remain competitive even for decades.

However, all else being equal, youth provides a significant advantage in modern chess. So, is there any benefit for children learning the game? To the best of our knowledge, chess does not bring any particular benefit to the brain. Chess skill has been found to be correlated with cognitive skills like working memory, processing speed and intelligence.

However, it's important to clarify that it doesn't mean that chess makes people smarter, it doesn't enhance cognitive skills. That said, chess education can still be valuable especially for children. It can help convey basic arithmetic and geometric concepts, such as counting squares, counting the value of the pieces, or understanding spatial relationships. This can make learning maths more approachable.

This isn't the first time we've talked about chess on the podcast. We've done an episode on sexism in the chess world, which you might know about if you have seen The Queen's Gambit. And you can listen to that episode wherever you get your BBC podcasts. And that brings us to the end of today's episode. I'm Hannah Gelbart. Thank you for joining us. This is What In The World from the BBC World Service. We'll see you next time. Bye. Yoga is more than just exercise. It's the spiritual practice that millions swear by.

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