CHENNAI: A WORLD champion (Open). A World Cup finalist (Open). Multiple individual and team gold medals at Olympiads among both Open and Women. A third woman GM. Multiple Candidates qualifiers in both Open and Women in 2024. Indian chess has had a whale of a time since August 2023.
And, now, a women's World Cup winner, a women's World Cup runner-up and the country's fourth woman GM. It truly is a game that continues to give to a region generally accepted as its spiritual home.
On Monday afternoon, Divya Deshmukh lived up to the prophecy as she became only the third women's World Cup champion in history after she bested Koneru Humpy in a tie-breaker after their two game final was drawn over the weekend.
All through the tournament in Batumi, the 19-year-old teen had surprised her opponents with aggressive as well as varied openings. She continued that when she had the black pieces. After Humpy played the Catalan, Deshmukh's usual aggressive style of play (4...dxc4, 5...Bb4+) was on display. On commentary for FIDE, Viswanathan Anand remarked: "This opening does give you a chance to counterattack," he said. "Divya will have to play passively for a few moves, which is not really her style."
She did play a bit passively but she had loads of time out of the opening. Under time scramble the best of GMs can fumble and that's what happened as Humpy, with under 60 seconds remaining, made a very committal 40. e4. Both players made misjudgments and the eval bar returned to dead level before the 38-year-old removed her opponent's advanced f pawn (54.Rxf4).
In theory, both players now had equal pieces (a rook and three pawns) but Deshmukh had more counterplay possibilities (queening pawns, setting up a decoy with the advanced a pawn and a more central king). When Humpy resigned, she was in danger of being mated in under 20 moves.
"It's hard for me to speak right now," she told FIDE after the final. "This definitely means a lot, but there's lot more to achieve."
Srinath Narayanan, a prominent coach who worked with her in 2020, said one of the big weapons she has are her openings. "I feel Divya's IM title is quite misleading... right up there at the GM," Narayanan, India's coach when his ward was part of the online Olympiad in 2020, said. "Her play is led by a powerful opening preparation and it's also backed by deep ambition. She starts applying pressure on her opponents right from the beginning and she keeps at it relentlessly.
"It mainly has to do with her unpredictability and her versatility. She has a very broad range of openings she can play with. Not easy to prepare against her and she remembers her lines reasonably well. She also has the advantage of the element of youth, one major factor I would say."
While it's easy to frame this win as a sort of baton-passing movement in Indian chess, Narayanan said it was more 'the next generation joining the current generation at the very top'. "I wouldn't say it's quite baton-changing because the previous generation is still there. It's not like they are being uprooted but I see it as a moment where it's more like the next generation is joining the top."
The Chennai GM also shed some light on what kind of a student Deshmukh was. "She was emotionally very expressive," he said. "We said a fun coach-student relationship. At the Olympiad in 2020, she wanted to play a lot but she didn't get a lot of the games and she was pretty upset about it for a large part of the tournament."
When asked to peak into the crystal ball, Narayanan opined that the teen could inspire a lot of youngsters, especially girls, to take up the game.
