Jamshedpur, Oct. 17: Children chasing each other all over the place and harrowed parents chasing the irrepressible children.
You are thinking park or picnic, right? Wrong. If you had racked your brains a little harder you would probably be participating in the Tata International Open Chess (TIOC) Tournament at the JRD Tata Sports Complex. That is exactly where all the bubbly children have been since October 13.
Twenty-eight children have taken the JRD Tata Complex by storm for the past few days. Fun and games were all very good, but when it came to playing chess, the little brains showed that they meant business.
Eight-year old Sahaj Grover of Delhi held 18-year-old Araghyadeep Das of Bengal, who has a rating of 2,299, to a draw in the fourth round. If you think that that was a tough tumble, 11-year-old S.P. Sethuraman of Chennai was a stunner. He held 35-year-old International Master Rahul Shetty in one of the rounds.
The residential wing of the sports complex is a beehive of activity. The scenes one witnesses there belie the unbelievable grit and dedication of the little participants. Parents pester the kids to work on their moves and go through books on chess during their free time. But, children wouldn’t be children if they did everything grown-ups asked them to. Seven-year-old Kumar Sanu of Dhanbad has so far garnered 1.5 points in four rounds. And when he isn’t at the board, he is pursuing his only other passion — hide-and-seek. “The tournament has given me good exposure. Playing different people teaches you a lot,” Sanu said before crawling back under a bed, from where he was fished out by another child after half-an-hour of relentless “seeking”.
Though a little in awe, the children seem to be glad to be in the company of grandmasters and international masters. Ten-year-old Rama Kumari of Chakradharpur and her sister Priyanka asked: “We have heard they are “big” players who seldom talk to children. Is it true?”
With an Elo rating of 1,924, Sahaj Grover is the youngest rated player in the country. A grade III student of Kulachi Hansraj Model School in Delhi, the kid is a winner of British Under-eight Championship and also a former national under-seven champion. “I am backing him to the hilt as he has the potential to become a good player. But he lacks sponsors,” said Grover’s mother Sangeeta. Parents’ presence acts as a major boost for these young ones. Though today’s defeat at the hands of senior Arindam Mukherjee did not keep Sethuraman down for too long. The prodigy, with three points till now, and an Elo rating of 1900, missed his father at the tournament. Playing on the lawns, he said: “His presence would have made me play better.”
The city kids — Ankit Kumar Singh, Shalini Srivastava and Bishnu Bala Priya — were a combination of energy and concentration. Eleven-year-old Priya started crying after losing her fifth round encounter, but she soon regained her composure to argue with the arbiter why she lost when the match could have been a draw.
Eight-year-old Ankit, a class III student of DAV and a winner of the recently-concluded state Children’s Chess Meet, said he has picked some new moves.
