So Divya Deshmukh will be taking on the men at the FIDE Grand Swiss chess tournament in Uzbekistan next month.
She would have stood a better chance of winning the title if she had opted to play in the women’s section of the high profile event. Instead she has chosen to start as one of the lower seeds in the open category (unlike in other sports, women are free to compete with men in chess). She got a wildcard from FIDE for the open section along with Russian Aleksandra Goryachkina.
The biggest attraction about the Grand Swiss is that the champion and the runner-up will qualify for next year’s Candidates tournament. That event is the qualifier for the World championship. Divya and Goryachkina have already booked their tickets for the Candidates: the Indian as the winner of the recent World Cup and the Russian from the FIDE Women’s Grand Prix.
So their decision to play in the open event at the Grand Swiss makes sense. Regardless of their results, Divya and Goryachkina will gain from their experience at Samarkand.
After becoming the first Indian woman to lift the World Cup, the 19-year-old is now at an important stage of her career. Playing against the higher-rated players could make her a stronger player.
The woman whom she defeated in the World Cup final, Koneru Humpy, is an example. The first woman from India to get the Grandmaster title had tried to play as many open tournaments as possible, from the time she was a little girl.
And Humpy often ruffled many a male ego. She, in fact, won the Asian under-12 boys’ title in 1999. She was also sensational at a couple of National men’s ‘A’ championships, winning successive games.
Hungary’s Judit Polgar was the one who showed the way to Humpy and other female warriors on the chessboard. She was once ranked No. 8 in the world among men (the more politically correct term ‘open’ would come in vogue only later). And her victims included several male World champions including Garry Kasparov and Viswanathan Anand.
Before Polgar, there have been players like Pia Cramling, the Swedish great who played at both the open and women’s Olympiads.
To go back to the Grand Swiss: the reigning champions are both Indians. In what was one of the greatest moments for India chess, Vidit Gujrathi and R. Vaishali had triumphed in the open and women’s sections, respectively, much against the odds, on the Isle of Man in late 2023.
