Vidit Gujrathi rocked his body back and forth ever so slightly as the last couple of seemingly perfunctory moves unfolded before him. It’s pretty much what bouncing with anticipation and delirium can look like in chess. On the 47th move, he paused, pushed his king to the h1 square, stopped his clock, and shook his opponent’s hand. At that very moment, it would have been understandable if the 29-year-old Indian burst into cartwheels.
Vidit arrived at the Isle of Man for the Fide Grand Swiss as the fifteenth seed, figured nowhere among the probable contenders, lost in the first round, and ten days later qualified for the Candidates and emerged winner in a tournament that featured three of the world’s top five players. It’s what Vidit, who does a fair deal of streaming, describes as “great storyline, good content”.
“I can’t recall the last time I won a tournament – any tournament, any format,” he said after, “After losing the first round, even I wouldn’t have bet on myself.”
He joins fellow Indian Praggnanandhaa in next year’s eight-player Candidates tournament that will determine the World Championship challenger.
The first round turned out to be the only one Vidit lost. He won seven and drew three of the remaining rounds. Heading into Sunday’s final round, co-leaders Hikaru Nakamura and Andrey Esipenko had superior tie-break scores to him. The Indian was considered the least likely to win among the trio. The cross-table weighed on his mind.
“I slept reasonably well but somehow woke up with the thought (on Sunday morning) that it’s a must-win.” Like before the start of every game, Vidit sat at the board on Sunday, head bowed, eyes closed and caught a few minutes of silence before his opponent Alexandr Predke arrived. Meditation has been working for him, he vouches. Opening with the Queen’s Gambit Accepted, they went for a quick Queen exchange and not too long after, Vidit was a pawn up with White. Had he settled for a draw, he still would have found a place in the Candidates (since Esipenko lost), but Vidit didn’t have reason to do so given his superior position on the board and no real threat.
Vidit came close to qualifying for the Candidates earlier this year. He made the quarterfinals of the World Cup in Baku, the only other player to enter the last eight in both the 2021 and 2023 editions apart from five-time world champion Magnus Carlsen. He had an impressive tournament, defeating two-time World Championship challenger Ian Nepomniachtchi to make the quarterfinals and was one win away from a possible Candidates spot. It’s then he ran into home hope in marauding form, Nijat Abasov.
“I’ve been doing the same things before, training just as sincerely, but it wasn’t clicking. Maybe there was a missing piece in the puzzle,” he said, “I was a lot more relaxed (at the Grand Swiss) than in the World Cup. Since the World Cup was a knockout format, I was pretty tense then.”
Vidit is no stranger to narrow misses. Three years ago, he went from a certain tournament victory to horror losses in the last two rounds to David Navara and Jan-Krzysztof Duda. It saw his Prague Masters title hopes go up in smoke.
“Every single chance that Vidit has had right there before him just seemed to go wrong. After all the near-misses, I’m glad he’s won,” Nakamura, who finished second and qualified for the Candidates alongside Vidit, said. “Among the Indians, he’s the one who gets overlooked because of Praggnanandhaa, Arjun, Gukesh, and Nihal. He tends to get lost among them. So, it’s nice to see him shine for once.”
Vidit didn’t become Grandmaster until he was around 19. Something of a late bloomer in chess. The pandemic brought about a boom in chess content and Vidit, like many others, took to streaming. He was soon commentating on games, cracking jokes and polishing off dinner, before live audiences. It turned him into among the most popular and well-loved chess faces online. He was captain of the Indian side that won gold in the 2020 Online Olympiad, at the height of the pandemic. The year before, he won the 2019 Biel Chess Festival with a round to spare.
The return of normalcy in the world also brought with it the rise of Indian prodigies –Praggnanandhaa, Gukesh, Arjun Erigaisi and Nihal Sarin. They were beating names they weren’t expected to beat, moving up the rankings, and taking over the mantle from former five-time world champion Viswanathan Anand. In this hubbub of fresh, exciting talent bursting onto the scene, Vidit was somewhat forgotten.
This year, he defeated Carlsen in the Pro Chess League, after the Norwegian missed a mate-in-3. In June he won the Maharashtra Challenge Match against Peter Svidler.
Now that the Grand Swiss is done, he has a bunch of months ahead of him and no major tournaments leading up to the Candidates. He’s now 2737 in the live ratings, ranked number 16 in the world. “I’m hoping this title will help me get invitations to other top events.”
For Vidit, the enormity of what he’s pulled off is yet to sink in. Soon after his win, when asked about his preparation plans for the Candidates still a few months away, he responded with an analogy of living in the moment.
“Let’s say you make a chocolate pie. You prepare it, put it in the oven and when it’s ready, you don’t start making another one. You enjoy it first. So, I’ll let this feeling stay with me, enjoy this win. It’s not so often that you get to do that.”
He knows he’s waited long enough.
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