‘Aggressive style is working for India’s youngsters,’ says Giri

New Delhi: When you start playing chess at the junior level, you never play for a draw. There is no sense of the future and none of the past too. You aren’t worried about rankings or the opponent. You sit at the table and winning is all that comes to mind.

But the higher they climb up the ratings, the lower this sense of adventure becomes. As an elite, you are supposed to change. That was always said, everybody assumed it to be the case, and everybody followed that rule.

“You get to the big tournaments, they tell you, ‘Okay, now you have to change your repertoire’, ‘you have to stop being so aggressive’, ‘it won’t work anymore’, ‘it doesn’t work anymore’. And then you sort of mellow down a bit and change,” said former world No.3 Anish Giri in an interview to HT.

But this is exactly where India’s young GMs have defied the norm. They haven’t chosen the safer path and made the hyper-aggressive approach work for them.

“But these youngsters, they sort of, maybe they are too arrogant to listen or they sort of stay the same way and they go after the top players as if they were still in these open tournaments. And it sort of works too,” said Giri, who has a peak Elo rating of 2802.

Works seems to be an understatement given how they dominated the Chess Olympiad. The Indian men’s team won 27 out of 44 games during the tournament and lost just once. Giri believes there was an element of luck too but in the end, it was the sheer class that bore out.

“They are particularly talented, particularly strong. But also, there is an element of luck involved too, I think,” said Giri. “I still see that with all the objective factors being in the favour of the players and everything going right, even on top of that, things also did go their way as well. For example, the crucial game against the USA where D Gukesh beat Fabiano (Caruana). That game was a very well-played game from both players for a very long time and then for unnecessary reasons Fabiano stumbled and lost.”

But there is no denying that this Indian team made its own luck too. Their aggressive style helps them rack up the wins and with the wins came the confidence to take on even stronger opponents.

“One thing that really helped for the youngsters in this case is that you start off always playing much lower rated teams. So you start off almost by default with wins. And especially if you have the style of the youngsters who are hyper aggressive and taking insane risks. And they’re very unlikely to give draws to weaker players. They’re absolute killers and taking insane risks and the risks get rewarded, the weaker the opponent, the more they get rewarded,” said Giri.

The Team USA players, on the other hand, are more old-school in their approach.

Giri added: “Let’s say when Wesley So faces 10 lower-rated players, he will beat five, draw five. When Arjun plays 10 lower-rated players, he will beat nine, maybe lose one, you know...”

The one thing that the Chess Olympiad did show was that the overall strength of Indian chess is improving rapidly. This is also visible in events like the Global Chess League where Giri is an icon player for the PBG Alaskan Knights. The team will also include Nodirbek Abdusattorov and Nihal Sarin.

“There is not only the top crop, but also the width, you know, the breadth,” said Giri. “Like if we play Olympiad on 100 boards, India is going to dominate even more because there’s like layers and layers of amazing players.”

For a long time, these players gravitated towards chess because of Viswanathan Anand’s achievements but now with the youngsters taking over, Gukesh’s World Championship match against Ding Liren in November becomes particularly important. A new generation requires a new hero.

“In general, matches are very, very different,” said Giri. “There is psychology and also the preparation is very different too. So you have much more time to focus on one particular opponent. So the depth in which you go is incomparable to the depth you go for before one game of the Olympiad.”

The preparation levels are insane — that is what put Magnus Carlsen off the classical format — but it also allow you to keep targetting the same opponent over and over again.

“At some point, players start to feel each other, you know, and it’s like these two, they start sharing some sort of special connection, you know, they start to like feel each other. And no one else understands what’s happening, except for these two. They are in that zone.”

As things stand, Giri sees Gukesh as the favourite but he also believes that the tag brings a different kind of pressure with it.

“It’s difficult, you know, if you face an opponent who is so down, first of all, the pressure on you becomes enormous, because you are in as a huge favourite. And secondly, some people they get compassionate or they get overconfident,” said Giri.

But Gukesh has enough time to calm the mind before the match begins on November 20 and perhaps this is where the aggressive style will help. He’ll not play the moment, he’ll not play Ding — he’ll just be playing a game of chess; a game he’d love to win.