In the final weeks of 2023, a few stakeholders quietly assembled for the Chennai Grand Masters, India's highest-rated Classical super tournament to date.
In what turned out to be a significant competition, India's D. Gukesh, whose form had tapered, found his mojo and won the event, gaining critical FIDE circuit points.
This victory allowed him to advance to the Candidates Tournament, where he will face Ding Liren for the world title later this month in Singapore.
Starting Tuesday, other top-rated Indian players—including current India No. 1 Arjun Erigaisi—will use the second edition of the Chennai Grand Masters as a platform to accumulate more circuit points.
In an interaction with this daily, tournament director Srinath Narayanan discussed the tournament's future and vision, including the Challengers event.
On when did the talks begin this time:
"We have things in place; it's now time to execute. We started talking sometime between July and August after the bid for the World Championship became clear. It was relatively straightforward dealing with the Tamil Nadu government, and they got back to us with a positive response."
On the nature of the tournament:
"In general, we aim for a field with as high an average rating as possible. However, we were all handicapped by the fact that the tournament calendar is incredibly busy right now. Even finding seven days to squeeze this tournament in wasn't easy. The Tata Steel starts two days after the last round of this tournament. Despite that, we are still clashing with the European individuals, which starts on the 7th. If you look at the field here, I would say that it's simply the best possible players who were available on these dates."
On the Challengers event:
"It happened more by design. For the first edition, we barely had time to even host one tournament; we put together the whole thing in just about two weeks or so, and a lot of things happened in the last few days. This time, since we had a bit more time, we were able to submit these proposals a bit more in advance. It was always part of the plan to have a Challengers tournament, which gives opportunities to the next line of talent. With the Masters, the focus is more on getting the average rating as high as possible. With Challengers, we can afford to be a bit more flexible—giving opportunities to women players and players from Tamil Nadu. It's a bit of a pity that we could only do an eight-player event this time due to calendar time constraints. In the future, we hope to make it a little bigger so that more players get opportunities in both the Challengers and Masters."
On the tournament's place in the calendar:
"We are looking forward to the tournament becoming an annual part of the calendar and becoming a Chennai tradition. We haven't held any talks yet, but we have the intent and the optimism that it will carry forward."
Eight Player Masters Field
Arjun Erigaisi 2797
Levon Aronian 2738
Maxime Vachier-Lagrave 2735
Vidit Gujrathi 2726
Parham Maghsoodloo 2719
-Alexey Sarana 2717
Amin Tabatabaei 2702
Aravindh Chidambaram 2698
Average Rating of Tournament: 2729
Eight Players Challengers Field
Raunak Sadhwani 2659
Abhimanyu Puranik 2639
Karthikeyan Murali 2624
Leon Mendonca 2622
Pranav V 2609
Pranesh M 2580
D. Harika 2493
R. Vaishali 2486
Total Prize Fund: Rs 70 lakh
Masters: Rs 50 lakh
Challengers: Rs 20 lakh
Masters' Top Prize: Rs 15 lakh
Challengers' Top Prize: Rs 6 lakh
Format
Seven rounds of Classical chess
First round at 3:00 PM on Tuesday
Final round at 1:00 PM on November 11.