Check This Mate

The Global Chess League, a brainchild of Anand Mahindra, has cracked the code to turn an intellectual sport into a snazzy, audience-focussed product

- KATHAKALI CHANDA

Of the many things Anand Mahindra has achieved in his career, bringing an early Christmas to sports fans in Mumbai is probably not one he had accounted for. Yet, in mid-December, chess turned into the city's unlikeliest spectacle as over 15,000 fans streamed into the storied Royal Opera House to watch elite players lock horns in a tournament envisioned by the chairman of the Mahindra Group.

This wasn't the first time, though, that the game's biggest names had come to India. The Tata Steel Chess India Open is an annual fixture for the rapid and blitz formats on the FIDE (the sport's governing body) calendar; in 2022, the 44th Chess Olympiad was staged in Chennai, and in November, the stars gathered in Goa for the FIDE World Cup.

But the third edition of the Tech Mahindra Global Chess League (GCL), the sport's first ever franchise league, wasn't chess as the purists know it. In a sport that's traditionally been individual, GCL flipped the script as teams squared off; staid formals were swapped for coloured tees; a theme song set to tune by AI bookended contests; and matches unfolded in front of a live audience—a unicorn of sorts in elite chess—plugged into commentary through headphones.

And once the clocks stopped, the players emerged onto the front courtyard to fevered choruses—of ‘Ali’ (French GM Alireza Firouzja), ‘Fabi’ (American GM Fabiano Caruana), ‘Anish’ (Dutch GM Anish Giri), what have you—and a clamour for autographs and selfies that makeshift barricades could barely contain. It’s a telling shift of fandom in a country that has, for decades, chanted ‘Anand’ (five-time world champion Viswanathan Anand) and has only recently graduated to the likes of ‘Gukesh’ (reigning world champion D Gukesh) or ‘Pragg’ (R Praggnanandhaa).