When venture capital firm WestBridge invited one of the world’s most famous chess players for an “offbeat” talk with investors about chess patterns, it resulted in a partnership that six years later has produced several world champions.
This month 18-year-old Pranav Venkatesh became junior world chess champion, crowning a string of successes not just for Indian players, but also for a chess academy set up by Viswanathan Anand, five-time world champion, with WestBridge.
Gukesh Dommaraju, also 18, last year became the youngest player to win the world champion title. Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa is ranked eighth in the world and his sister, Vaishali Rameshbabu, is ranked 14th among women chess players. All trained at the WestBridge Anand Chess Academy, known as Waca.
The venture capitalist firm, known for backing ecommerce platform Meesho and rideshare company Rapido, among others, said there was a clear logic to bringing business thinking to the philanthropic endeavour of training chess players.
While Anand brought in “everything related to excellence in chess” that effort and everything around it needed to be organised, said WestBridge managing partner Sandeep Singhal.
“Our daily business is to find an idea and scale it,” Singhal told the Financial Times. “One of the things that is lacking in India, or was lacking in India, is how do you take an individual who’s got talent and provide them with all the complementary assets that are required for them to make that transition.”
Anand’s success has inspired many across India to take up chess, with the burgeoning middle-class sending children, some as young as three, to the many academies that have cropped up across towns and cities. While many parents hope the study of chess will help their children academically, Waca’s goal is to enable the most talented compete globally.
For decades Anand, who became the country’s first grandmaster in 1988, was the only Indian among the International Chess Federation’s 50 highest ranked players, a fact that prompted him to think about the next generation of players. “Why do we have so many excellent juniors, but I was the only player in the top 50 . . . What is that wall that is holding them back?”
Anand was in part inspired by the chess school started nearly 60 years ago by Mikhail Botvinnik, the Soviet chess titan, who trained champions Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov.
“In Botvinnik’s time, his analysis itself was unique knowledge,” Anand said, adding that technology had “revolutionised” training, with artificial intelligence generating ideas and tactics that teachers could interpret and use in lessons.
Anand handpicks players for the academy, choosing those he thinks have the potential to reach the elite levels of the game. Waca’s 14 fellows learn from free online sessions with seven to eight trainers.
“We thought it’s not necessary for them to learn everything the hard way. There are things we can tell them in advance and so they don’t have to make those mistakes,” said Anand, who began playing chess at the age of six, taught by his mother.
To reach the pinnacle of any game, said Sagar Shah, co-founder of Chessbase India, a chess-focused news, software and videos platform, “you need guidance from a space which has been reached by very few people in the history of the sport”.
In 2022 during the international Chess Olympiad in Chennai, Dommaraju lost to Uzbek grandmaster Nodirbek Abdusattorov from a winning position. Shah said that Anand had met Dommaraju that day, sending the message that: “I’m with you. I have been through what you are going through, and you know, we’ll come out of this”.
Singhal said that at Waca they tried to think about “multiple intelligent perspectives . . . is there anything else that’s a little X Factor”.
He noted the decision, unusual in the world of chess, to bring South African cricket coach Paddy Upton to help Dommaraju prepare mentally for the world championship.
Anand also recommended his former trainer, Polish grandmaster Grzegorz Gajewski, as a mentor. This kind of flexibility helped create this “magic that gave India its second world champion”, Chessbase’s Shah said.
