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Abhijit Kunt is the man who witnessed the changes of the ages. The man who became India’s fourth-greatest master has tales of fine-tuning his chess game from Russian books that arrived over the sea and chess lines that were to be written or copied into files as part of preparation for the competition.
Last year, he was part of the Indian team’s training preparation for the Chess Olympiad. Currently, he is the manager of the Balan Alaskan Knights in the inaugural season of the World Chess League, which features some big names like Ian Nepomniachtchi and Teimour Radjabov along with promising stars like Raunak Sadhwani and Nodirbek Abdusattorov.
He spoke to The Indian Express from Dubai about the return of things in his era. and the new era in sports, ushered in by GCL. Excerpts:
You are someone who has watched the growth of Indian chess up close. Back when I became a GM (in 2000) to date, how drastically have things changed?
When I started playing chess, it wasn’t a profession. There were no computers or cell phones. The travel itself was quite a challenge. We are now in a completely different era. I got my first laptop back in 2001. I was a former geek back then. The machines at that time were not very powerful. Now the training methodology has changed a lot. Because of the Internet, many things have changed.
Abhijit Kunt in 1986
When we were playing, to get chess books in India, it used to take us six months. By then, a new edition of this book was going to be on the market because it would be published every four months. And there were a lot of developments in those months. These books were only in Russian, and they were published in Yugoslavia or America. If we wanted it by air mail, it used to cost us 30$ or 40$. This was an extremely high price for a single chess book. So we used to get it by sea mail. Getting knowledge has never been so easy.
Now, because of the internet, you get the data available to everyone at the same time. This put us on a par with other countries. That helped chess in India a lot. Now the economy is doing very well. This helps players to play a lot of tournaments abroad. If you see GCL, which is happening for the first time, the owners are from India. India is investing heavily in chess. It is an intellectual sport and easy for Indians to relate to.
If you were telling these everyday anecdotes to some of these GM teens from India, how difficult would it be for them to understand or connect?
I was in a training camp with the young players before the Chess Olympiad last year. In the past, our coaches said that playing three-minute blitz games wasn’t good. Then we came to the games with time control of 1 minute each. That was too bad for the coach. These guys improvise so much, they play 10 seconds games (per move)! I was just talking to them trying to understand how they do it. They said, “You just need to move fast.” In this internet age, they do many things play online… They don’t know a world without computers.
Nowadays we are used to writing moves and keeping files. A line (sequence of moves) that we were getting ready to play in a tournament, we would make copies of all the moves in that line and paste them into books and files and carry them with us to tournaments because we couldn’t carry a lot of books with us. The problem was if a new step came in, and the line ended, or there was an improvement on it, your whole work was wasted.
The training methodology was completely different. We used to play quite a few lines. Because you had to deeply prepare those lines. There was a lot of hard work. To prepare one line, it may take 1-2 months. Now you can do it in a week because everything is available on the internet.
But have you seen some semblance of constancy with the changing ages?
Viswanathan Anand is an excellent example. He was from a different era, but he had adapted and perfected new technologies! There are very few players like him, who are still very competitive. It was very competitive in terms of chess engines or databases.
Speaking of changing times, how was your experience as a team manager at GCL?
The atmosphere is electric. The players and event organization are both top notch. It’s a rare occasion.
Of course, we have team championships in European countries. But the format is classic, and it lasts longer. Players are used to playing in a team tournament. But the short-lived franchise-based tournament is something the sport is exploring for the first time. The matches so far have been very intense. There were no short draws. If you see, most games lasted until the last minute.
What is the team’s strategy in the draft for the Balan Alaskan Knights?
We had to make sure we had a balanced team because each board had the same number of points. In the draft, we had to manage a limited number of points: each team had 1,000 points to get two players. So we couldn’t get any players we wanted.
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