FIDE’s official motto, Gens una sumus (we are one family), was adopted in 1952, almost three decades after the chess governing body was set up in 1924. On its face, the motto carries the naïve idealism of a mid-twentieth-century world recovering from the horrors of the Second World War.A hopeful attempt to frame a centuries-old…
Savitha Shri will represent India at Women’s Chess Olympiad this year (Special Arrangements) NEW DELHI: The last time the Indian women’s team took part in the biennial Chess Olympiad, they won gold. The team consisted of Harika Dronavalli, Rameshbabu Vaishali, Divya Deshmukh, Vantika Agrawal, and Tania Sachdev. Two years have passed since that Budapest conquest,…
All India Chess Federation (AICF) acts after Grandmaster Abhijeet Gupta’s concerns NEW DELHI: The All India Chess Federation (AICF) is working to ensure the senior National Chess Championship is held later this year after concerns were raised over the tournament’s initial scheduling for March 2027.TimesofIndia.com has learnt that AICF officials are in constant touch with…
The Laugardælir Church near Selfoss is so easy to miss that I had to find it using Google Maps. A small white timber building and a scatter of headstones in the southern Icelandic quiet, an hour or so from Reykjavík, ringed by nothing but farmland. This is the final resting spot of Bobby Fischer, one…
My earliest memory of chess is from when I was seven years old.Walking into the venue of my first international tournament, my hand tucked inside my mother’s, I stopped beneath the emblem of FIDE, the international federation governing chess. Three words, printed in a language I didn’t understand, caught my eye. Gens Una Sumus.As I…
Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel with Mahatma Gandhi and Anshul Bhatt with chess legend Viswanathan Anand NEW DELHI: As a young barrister in Ahmedabad, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel spent his evenings at the Gujarat Club, where he would play bridge and smoke cigars, and it was there that he first heard about a man named Gandhi returning from…
India’s 99th chess Grandmaster Rathanvel VS (Designed by TimesofIndia.com) NEW DELHI: Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, felt as though the wait was almost over. Nearly a decade after the end of the ten-year Trojan War, he and his crew were finally within reach of home, only to find themselves on the verge of losing all…
Survival story of 16-year-old Md Imran (Special Arrangements) NEW DELHI: The bus pulled away just after 8 PM. Md Imran, hungry after eight hours on the road, had stepped off during a scheduled ten-minute stop in Bratislava, Slovakia, just looking for biscuits and coffee. He made it back to the platform in time and frantically…
FIDE Women’s World Cup 2025 Divya Deshmukh and FIDE World Cup 2025 winner Javokhir Sindarov (PTI Photos) The International Chess Federation (FIDE) has approved a major overhaul of the World Cup and Women’s World Cup formats from 2027, aiming to make the tournaments shorter, more inclusive and more rewarding for players.The biggest change is that…
D Gukesh and Hans Niemann The Chennai Grand Masters 2026 returns from July 16 to July 22 at The Westin Chennai Velachery. It will bring together some of the world’s best chess players for the fourth edition of India’s strongest classical chess tournament. With reigning World Chess Champion Gukesh Dommaraju leading the field, the event…