Former West Bengal Chief Minister Jyoti Basu inaugurates the Grand Simultaneous Chess meet at the Netaji Indoor Stadium on Saturday. GMs Surya Sekhar Ganguly (left) and Dibyendu Barua look on. Picture by Gautam Bose

Calcutta: Amidst a city busy in revelry on new year’s eve, chess players of the city seemed to be in an island of their own as they were in for a different treat. Eight Grandmasters, including the national men’s and women’s champions, took on 300 players in a tandem simultaneous match at Netaji Indoor Stadium on Saturday.

The match ? brainchild of the Chess Players’ Association of India (CPAI) to commemorate it’s first anniversary ? is being held in the country for the first time. GMs Abhijit Kunte, Surya Sekhar Ganguly, Sandipan Chanda, Dibyendu Barua, R. B. Ramesh, Tejas Bakre and WGM Nisha Mohota and Swati Ghate made their moves in tandem.

At the end of it, the GMs took more than five hours to complete their games and each GM had to walk nearly 10 km to play against the 300 players.

After the match, GM Kunte told The Telegraph, “The toughest part of the match was the walk, and I was taken aback when some of the players made two moves in succession and captured our pieces.”

At the end of it, the GMs won 278 games, drew 12 games, and lost 10 games.

“It was really difficult to play in tandem as after someone had sacrificed a piece, the next player, a positional player, played a waiting move instead of going for an attack,” said city-based national champion Surya Sekhar.

GM Dibyendu said, “We are happy with the response from the people of Calcutta. We are planning our second all-India rapid in May. GM Viswanathan Anand has agreed to be present as a guest. The tournament will be finalised after we get the dates from Anand”.

Those who beat the GMs were 8-year-old Arpan Das, state junior and sub-junior champion Debaditya Sinha Biswas, Suman Basu, British U-14 champion Ankush Khandelwal, Shyamol Sarkar, Anjan Kr Ghosh, Shabaditya Mukherjee, Sarbajit Adhikary and Shaati Majumder.