Rajasthan’s first AGM Chandrajeet Singh Rajawat with his family (Special Arrangements) NEW DELHI: “Shahr mashhoor-e-zamana dekhne aaya hoon main / Rajdhani teri raana dekhne aaya hoon main / Khushnuma jheelon mein larzaan jin ka hai aks-e-jameel / Un haseen mahalon ka naqsha dekhne aaya hoon main.” (I have come to see this city, famed the…
Grandmaster R Praggnanandhaa (PTI Photo) India’s R Praggnanandhaa settles for another draw at the Sinquefield Cup, but remains firmly in contention with three rounds left in the Grand Chess Tour event.Praggnanandhaa draws Levon Aronian of the United States in the sixth round and stays joint second with 3.5 points. Praggnanandhaa holds on despite pressure Praggnanandhaa…
The Grandmaster View by India’s 93rd GM Aarav Dengla On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. On the other side of the ocean, the final stage of the 1939 Chess Olympiad was getting underway in Buenos Aires.It was the first Olympiad to be organized outside Europe and was the largest to date, with twenty-seven national…
Bodhana Sivanandan and Shreyas Royal Indian-origin teenagers Bodhana Sivanandan and Shreyas Royal have made a major mark on British chess after winning the women’s and open titles at the 2026 British Chess Championships in Coventry.Bodhana, just 11, became the youngest-ever British women’s champion after beating 14-year-old Ireland-based talent Trisha Kanyamarala in a tense rapid-chess playoff.Her…
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…