Now everyone knows his name: Gukesh Dommaraju

Gukesh Dommaraju becomes the youngest ever World Chess Champion at 18 years of age and he is the 18th World Chess Champion!! Gukesh brings back the title back to India after Magnus Carlsen took it from Vishy Anand in 2013. I remember watching the live telecast of that match happening in Chennai, and I remember the heartbreak. But now the trophy is back home!!

Chess has been more of a neglected sport in our country and actually most other countries. In fact many people won’t even accept it categorized as a sport, so even though we had Vishy as a 5 times world champion, the recognition to the sport and the players was fairly limited. Some companies like ONGC and Indian Oil had previously employed some top chess players so that they won’t have to worry about earning a living, most of them had to pay for their training, travelling and all other expenses out of pocket, which is not easy at all.

Furthermore, younger chess players are often categorized as nerds and laughed at by their friends, and the sport is not considered as cool as playing football or cricket. The image of chess players in general is of geeky, quite, introverted people who cannot easily fit in the society, which in my opinion is because they are generally smarter than the average lot 😂

But all of this changed in 2020, when everyone was stuck at home and YouTube channels like ChessBase India and Samay Raina started streaming chess and made it more approachable and funny that pulled in an audience. There’s been times when their chess streams had more than 100k live viewership, and with these numbers obviously come in the sponsors.

Now, many companies have sponsored these young players for a lucrative sum of money that was needed not only for these players to train and perform better, but also for the parents of many kids that have the potential to do something great in chess and had to start young in that direction.

Having Gukesh as the youngest world champion, feels like the biggest push for parents, viewers, sport organizations and the government to pay more attention and importance to this sport and take India to the levels of world chess dominance that USSR and the Russia once had.

Things are going good. Congrats Guki!! ❤️