CHENNAI: It’s puzzling how chess isn’t already entrenched in South American culture. That’s because the game seems tailor-made for the continent. Chess, thanks to 16th century Spanish travellers, had found its way there much before it made it to what is now the USA.
There are sprinklings of the game here and there in their literature. Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera begins with the protagonist discovering the suicide of a chess-mate. The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, like Marquez a Nobel laureate, once likened chess to poetry. And one of the game’s greatest players, Jose Raul Capablanca, was born, not too far away from the continent, in Cuba. Buenos Aires hosted a Chess Olympiad as early as 1939.
Yet chess, for some reason, never caught on there, as it did elsewhere. FIDE records state that of the 1500-odd active Grandmasters, the 12 South American countries between them have contributed only 70. India alone has 64 and will likely move past that figure over the next year.
The ongoing Chennai Open is one of those rare Indian tournaments with a South American presence. Second seed Jose Martinez Alcantara is one of the three GMs from the continent in the fray. The 20-year-old may still be in the dawn of his career but he has seen enough ups and downs already. When he was a teenager and a norm away from becoming a GM, Alcantara spent a year-and-a-half away from the game, frustrated with the lack of support.
“I decided to do other things,” he says. It was the kind of situation that his counterparts in USA, Russia or India rarely face. But then, Alcantara was no stranger to neglect, having grown up in a football-crazy country. “At first, in my school, I was the only one who played chess,” he says. “I changed schools to be at another place that supported the game more.”
Now Peru’s number three, things haven’t got much better for the youngster. He still has no coach and no funds. “I don’t have a coach right now,” he says. “I’m training alone and I’m trying to improve. It’s not easy to find a coach at the level that I am now. It’s difficult.“I’m paying out of my own pocket to get to the tournaments that I play in,” Alcantara adds. “The government gives me a monthly stipend. It’s good money in Peru but not enough to travel or hire a coach.”
Alcantara, who took to the game aged five-and-a-half after receiving a chess set from his father, heard about the Chennai Open from a friend. His maiden sojourn to India started in New Delhi where he participated in the Delhi Open. “I came to know of this tournament through a friend. I wanted to try to play in other countries and face different types of players.”
And what, according to him, is required to finally bring South American chess on a par with the game in North America, Asia and Europe? “It’s difficult to change the customs of the people,” he says. “We need more and more promotion of the game, more events and tournaments.”
Select results (Indians unless specified)
Karthikeyan P (3.5) drew with Ponkratov Pavel (Rus 3.5), Martinez Alcantara Jose Eduardo (Per 4) bt Nitin S (3), Mchedlishvili Mikheil (Geo 3) lost to Harshavardhan GB (4), Bogdanovich Stanislav (Ukr 4) bt Saravana Krishnan P (3), Sidhant Mohapatra (3) lost to Visakh NR (4), Pranav V (3.5) drew with Karthik Venkataraman (3.5), Vishnu Prasanna V (3.5) drew with Lakshmi Narayanan MV (3.5), Taher Yoseph Theolifus (Ina 3.5) drew with Priyanka K (3.5), Jubin Jimmy (3.5) drew with Neverov Valeriy (Ukr 3.5), Deshmukh Anup (3) lost to Das Sayantan (4), Khusenkhojaev Muhammad (Tjk 4) bt Ramakrishna J (3), Muthiah Al (2.5) lost to Goganov Aleksey (Rus 3.5), Amir Moheb (Egy 3.5) bt Rozum Ivan (Rus 2.5), Senthil Maran K (2.5) lost to David Alberto (Ita 3.5).
Three Indians in lead
Double International Master norm-holder Harshavardhan GB, a student of Velammal School, Chennai stunned GM Mchedlishvili Mikheil of Georgia and moved into shared lead after the fourth round of the 12th Chennai Open International Grandmaster Chess tournament. Apart from Harshavardhan, Sayantan Das and Visakh NR share the lead with Jose Martinez Alcantara of Peru, Stanislav Bogdanovich of
Ukraine and Muhammad Khusenkhojaev of Tajikistan.