The line (sequence of moves) we were preparing to play in a tournament, we would make photocopies of all the moves in that line and paste them in books and files and carry them with us to tournaments cause we couldn’t carry so many books with us. They said, ‘you just need to move fast.’ In this internet era, they do so much stuff playing online… they don’t know a world without computers.īack in our day, we used to write down moves and maintain files. These young guys have improvised so much, they play 10-second (per move) games! I was just talking to them trying to understand how they do it. That was very bad as far as a coach is concerned. Then we came to games with one-minute time control each. Back in the day, our coaches said playing three-minute blitz games was not good. I was in a training camp with the young players before the Chess Olympiad last year. If you were telling these back-in-the-day anecdotes to some of these teenaged GMs from India, how difficult is it for them to understand or relate? It’s an intellectual sport and it’s easy for Indians to connect with it. If you see the GCL, which is happening for the first time, the owners are from India. So that’s helping players to play a lot of tournaments abroad.
That got us at par with the other countries. Now, because of the internet, you get data available to everyone at the same time. That was a very expensive price for one chess book. If we wanted it by air mail, it used to cost us $30 or $40. Those books were only in Russian, and were published in Yugoslavia or America. And there had been a lot of developments in those months. By that time a new edition of that book would have come in the market because it would be published every four months. (PHOTO: Abhijit Kunte/Instagram)īack when we were playing, to get chess books in India, it used to take us six months’ time. Abhijit Kunte, who became the fourth grandmaster from India, playing in a tournament in Sangli in 1986.
Because of the internet, a lot of things have changed. Now the training methodology has changed a lot. When I started playing chess, it was not a profession. Back when you became a GM (in 2000) to now, how drastically have things changed? You’re someone who has seen the growth of Indian chess up close.
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