Gukesh used that ’Bridge!

The meteoric rise of Dommaraju Gukesh from a talented teenager to the youngestever world chess champion at 18 has made the sporting world to stand up and applaudThe youngster flying high and then soaring with remarkable speed and perfect accuracy towards his destination only remind one how he so innocently yet emphatically declared a few years that he would do the incredibleNatural talent and temperament were the biggest contributing factors but the wind beneath his wings was the WestBridge Anand Chess Academy WACA spearheaded by fivetime World Chess Champion Viswanathan AnandAlso Read3rd Test Potts Atkinson help England fight back against NZIndiarsquos D Gukesh with the FIDE World Chess Championship trophy in Singapore on Friday PicPTIWACA is a collaboration between Anand and Bangalorebased WestBridge Capital spearheaded by Sandeep Singhal The online academy started in 2021 to create a platform to facilitate mentorship in nurturing young chess talents in India The speed with which the players enrolled with WACA and blossomed in the last four years promises is extraordinary And therersquos more laurels to comeMany prominent namesRameshbabu Praggnanandhaa R Vaishali Gukesh Arjun Erigaisi Nihal Sarin Raunak Sadhwani Avantika Agrawal were the first few to propel Indian chess towards glory over the last couple of years Indiarsquos firstever gold medals at the Chess Olympiad in both the Open and the Womenrsquos section had WACA players performing prominentlyAs for Gukesh he has been totally coached polished and financed by WACA with Anand taking a keen interest in his journey Anandrsquos experience at the elite level be it in terms of chess preparation strategy or choice of coaches to strengthen all aspects of his game have benefitted Gukesh immensely It added that muchneeded confidence to navigate the rough terrain smoothly In fact Gukesh and Pragg attended group classes initially and benefitted from themAnand prefers to call these prodigies his ldquoWACA kidsrdquo and understandably takes pride in their achievements ldquoInitially when we started with Gukesh we envisaged a fiveyear progress to an ELO 2750 but his speed has been phenomenalrdquo said AnandInformal approachThings are rather informal at WACA with the enlisted players sharing their files of the games played with Anand who then goes through them and after evaluation assigns a coach to match the playing style of the player There are no timeframes or structured rules but proactive collaboration of the players with their coaches is given prominence when considering further assistanceFormer World Championship challenger Boris Gelfand Grzegorz Gajewski part of former Team Anand for the World Championship and Sandipan Chanda were the initial trainers at WACA Now Vishnu Prasanna Gukeshrsquos previous coach and Shyam Sundar have also been enlisted Anand added ldquoWACA has been working with several new players like Savithshree Pranav Anand Pranesh Aditya Samanth to name a few and established ones like Abhimanyu Puranik Rakshita Ravi and a few more apart from the ones we initially started with Fifteenyearold AR Ilamparthi and Arvind Chithambaram have joined recently We have been focusing on Leon Mendonca with extensive personalised coaching as he is set to play at Wijk Aan Zee in JanuaryrdquoSinghal of Westbridge Capital added ldquoAll chess related decisions are taken by Anand and the Academy is structured on his experience If there is a talent and an opportunity to help WestBridge is always readyrdquo