Kingsmen: How Viswanathan Anand is shaping chess’s golden circle
His academy offers training and vital emotional, logistical support. He wants to give young GMs things he wishes he’d had when he first set out, Anand says.
A five-time world champion to help with cold feet before a Super tournament. A last-minute runthrough of endgame tactics with a former World No 3, via Zoom. A travelling trainer to shoulder the weight of opening preparations and double as paddle-tennis partner.

The WestBridge Anand Chess Academy (WACA) — the brainchild of India’s only world champion, Viswanathan Anand — has made all of the above accessible to a group of India’s most promising young grandmasters, since its launch in December 2020. The results are splashed across the headlines today.
The two Indian teenagers who have been closing in on world chess domination over the past three weeks have been D Gukesh, 17, and R Praggnanandhaa, 18. One has surpassed Anand in the live ratings to enter the global Top 10. The other has made it to the World Cup final and qualified for the Candidates tournament, the only Indian to do so since Anand. (Praggnanandhaa eventually lost, on August 24, to World No 1 Magnus Carlsen.)
Both young Indians currently have an Elo rating of over 2700, as does Arjun Erigaisi, 19.
At WACA, the current core group of players — Gukesh, Praggnanandhaa, Nihal Sarin, R Vaishali, Savitha Shri B and Vantika Agrawal, all between the ages of 17 and 22 — have access to Anand’s mentorship as well as the training and domain knowledge of a varied bunch of grandmasters from around the world. These include Grzegorz Gajewski, 38, of Poland; Artur Yusupov, 63, of Germany; and Sandipan Chanda, 40, from Kolkata.
Each has a well-defined role. Gajewski’s focus is opening ideas. Chanda is responsible for middlegames. Yusupov brings in endgame expertise.
It started with group sessions during the pandemic, and now, with at least a couple of the young players taking huge strides, the focus is individual sessions and customised training.
These are not facilities extended only to the core group. They’re provisioned according to need. Pranav Venkatesh, 16, who turned grandmaster last year and is a member of the WACA feeder group, received some private training sessions before he travelled for the recent Saint Louis summer classic.
“Our vision was always to position ourselves as an addition to players’ existing training set-up, some extra help,” says Anand, 53. “What we’ve found now is that, at least at the top, say with guys such as Gukesh and Praggnanandhaa, the training has to be more personalised, tailored to their needs. It’s like customised service in that sense. You have to be in the same room as them and know what they’re going through rather than assuming you have all the answers.”
Boris Gelfand, 55, who won the World Cup in 2009 and is a close friend of Anand, also conducts sessions with WACA players. RB Ramesh, 47, who has been coaching Praggnanandhaa, Vaishali and Savitha since they were children, has been integrated into the WACA ecosystem too.
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His own solo run as the only Indian in elite chess, for years, has shaped Anand’s academy. Emerging as a 15-year-old prodigy in the 1980s, he watched as Russian players got the kind of institutional support (albeit driven by geopolitical motives) he couldn’t dream of. He was among the first non-Soviet players after the US’s Bobby Fischer to storm the bastion. To get there he had to move to Europe, live away from his parents and find a way to sustain himself as he readied to fight the world’s best players.

Even after him, generations of Indian players struggled to even find a grandmaster to coach them. “It was a trial-and-error process. There was a lot of flawed training and we didn’t always have the concepts right in our early years. By the time we realised and unlearnt them, it was too late to catch up with the rest of the world,” GM Surya Shekhar Ganguly once told me, “This lot has managed to skip all that.”
While Anand had quietly, for decades, invited young grandmasters into his home, and helped out with advice and tips when he could (Vaishali and Praggnanandhaa were among those who visited his home as children, in this manner), the pandemic accelerated his formal transition from player to mentor.
In 2020, tournaments came to a standstill worldwide and Anand, at 50, embraced a fresh phase. WACA was launched that December. “In our initial chats, Anand’s vision was that we’ll get a few players into 2700 in the first three years and break into the Top 10 in five years. But here we are. We’ve met our five-year goals in less than three years,” says co-founder Sandeep Singhal, who is managing director of the Bengaluru-based investment company WestBridge Capital.
Anand’s core idea was to create something similar to the late Russian GM Mikhail Botvinnik’s iconic Soviet Chess School. Set up in 1963, it is where world champions such as Garry Kasparov, Anatoly Karpov and Vladimir Kramnik trained. Anand wanted his school to be a place where youngsters could develop a work ethic, learn the importance of self-analysis (a key tenet of Botvinnik’s teachings too) and transition from talented juniors to world-beaters.
At WACA, strong players and experienced trainers work together to arrive at optimal solutions. There is an exchange of ideas, a posing of problems. Sometimes, it’s just asking each other about their experiences, with a focus on specific areas and problems.
Like any good mentor, Anand believes in teaching his students early, what he learnt late. “Sometimes it’s when they’re upset or feeling vulnerable that they may be the most open to hearing you out. But you also have to know when to take a step back. Gukesh had a disastrous start at Wijk aan Zee in the Netherlands this year. We left it at that. You don’t always know what state a player is in during a tournament, and you don’t want to sit there and babble.”
The trainers submit monthly feedback reports to Anand on each of the players they’ve been working with. It gives Anand an idea of their progress. “Of course, they’ve exceeded all expectations at this World Cup,” he says.
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Modern chess can make brutal demands on the body and building stamina is paramount too. Fatigue can blur focus, cause blunders on the board. Morning jogs through sleet and snow were mandatory for Botvinnik’s pupils. Anand isn’t as harsh. His instructions to the students are simple: go to the gym, pick at least one physical sport and make it your go-to activity when you need to shake off a bad result.
Right after a not-so-great outing at the Global Chess League in June, the first thing Gukesh asked his father for was access to a space with table-tennis near their home in Chennai. He spent the days after his return to the city thrashing out his emotions. Through WACA, he has a racquet-sport partner in Gajewski, who travelled with him for Norway Chess and the World Cup.
“At the start we tracked their physical activity levels and let’s say all of them weren’t equally great. Like most teens, they had also had a lot of screen time during the pandemic. Most of them joined gyms close to their homes, and play at least one (physical) sport now,” says Aruna Anand, 49, Viswanathan’s wife and manager, who now also manages non-chess administration at WACA.
“Anand Sir doesn’t act like a teacher who always wants answers from us. Sometimes he’ll join us in solving interesting positions which a friend may have passed on to him,” says Vaishali. “We often lose track of time and go over positions for hours, well after a session was supposed to end. It’s like setting out on an expedition together, not knowing what we might discover.”
A lot of the philosophy of wanting to nurture young players and offer them the support they need, Aruna says, comes from Anand’s own years of struggle in Europe. A Spanish couple, chess trainer Mauricio Perera and his wife Nieves Perera, opened up their home to him and acted as local guardians, as he trained there in the 1990s.
So, “WACA players are part of an extended family, that’s how we look at it. It’s not strictly a professional arrangement,” Aruna says. Before his Wijk aan Zee debut in 2022, for instance, she took Praggnanandhaa shopping for some new clothes on behalf of WACA.
“The idea that they should all be supplied with smart blazers, pants and shirts came from WestBridge. Little things like being well dressed, add to confidence,” she says.
Aruna also keeps in constant touch with the parents of WACA mentees. “These are teenage players who may not always want to or know how to express what’s on their minds. So, through parents sometimes we get a better understanding of what someone might need and try to address it,” she says.
While on the subject of parents, lately, phones at WACA have been ringing off the hook. Amid its students’ recent successes, “we have parents calling and writing to us saying their three-year-old can name all the chess pieces or their five-year-old can guess moves ‘and name the capitals of every country in the world’,” says Aruna, laughing. “Of course, it’s not feasible for us at WACA to take them all in. This was never meant to be a talent-scouting centre. What it will be is a place where young players of a certain calibre can find all the expertise and resources they need to break into the next level. We are aiming for continuity. It shouldn’t stop with Gukesh and Praggnanandhaa.”
