My Journey with chess
So it was a periodic schedule of late-night sleeps and the morning starts with saying good afternoon, so following the schedule, I woke up at 12–1 pm and scrolled my youtube, couldn’t find anything related, I was so bored that I would have seen Modi and Bear Grylls episode of Man VS Wild, but luckily I found an episode featuring Tanmay Bhat ( A well-Known Comedian of India), Bhuvan Bam (A well-known YouTuber) and one more personality whom I didn’t know, streamed by someone whom I didn’t know as well, it was a 2-hour long video my brain was pushing me to just close it and watch something else, but I recalled if I didn’t watch this the only option left with me is to watch Modi Ji in the jungle, I decided to watch Tanmay Bhatt playing chess instead.
so this guy who streamed seemed a bit funny as well as the unknown guy Aakash Gupta who is also a top comedian, who at first seemed unknown to me, his jokes during the stream recalled me of his episode of [Dogs], he was too good there, so now I am all in at 4th or 5th minute of the video.
They started playing chess, it was some Hand and Brain, there were two groups each have one brain and one hand the brain had to decide the piece and the hand had to play it on the board, and the most interesting part was all of them don’t know how to play except one. so it was just chaos on the board nothing else ……
I loved the stream the way they were making the audience laugh after each move was too good, I watched a few more streams after this stream so it was fun watching them, especially Samay Raina!
I never played chess but I always keep an eye on Indian Team performance in these fields, I already knew few grandmasters like Vishy Anand, Harikrishna and all, so between all these, I saw Samay Raina and one more channel ChessBase India is streaming chess Olympiad on their channel, so I watched the quarter-finals between India and Armenia, where India comfortably beat Armenia and it was so nice to see Vishwanathan Anand play.
Moving on to the semifinals we played against Poland, It was not an easy victory for India lost the first match with a score of 4–2. But, in the second match, we made a comeback with 4.5–1.5. The match went into an Armageddon and it was the super-woman of Indian chess Koneru Humpy who came to the fore and delivered! India qualified to the finals!
it was a goosebumps moment watching the confidence of Koneru Humpy, I was shocked! she is one of the strongest women GM all over the world!
Captain Vidit Gujrathi jumped with happiness! GM Srinath, the vice-captain, who is as calm as our Former India captain MS Dhoni just had a smile on his face. Humpy had done it for India! A historic win for India, winning a silver medal for the first time not only that a platform is set to defeat Russia.
Final Countdown India vs Russia, for all of the people who don’t know much about chess I must tell you, Chess is in Russian Culture like for us Indians cricket is everything… for them its chess, so defeating Russia was going to very very tough.
it was a chaotic final, in the first round the score was 3–3 moving on to the second round (Nepomniachtchi ½–½ Anand) (Dubov ½–½ Vidit) (Kosteniuk ½–½ Harika) there was a draw on all these three boards, Humpy lost, Nihal and Divya lost on time suddenly which was unbelievable, after the investigation we get to know that they lost connection its a rule that if there is an issue with your internet then that’s your fault, you are lost then but that was not a case
Actually, it was a global internet outage!
Arkady Dvorkovich’s (president of the FIDE) official statement:
Online Chess Olympiad has been impacted by a global internet outage, that severely affected several countries, including India. Two of the Indian players have been affected and lost connection when the outcome of the match was still unclear.
The Appeals Committee has examined all the evidence provided by Chess.com, as well as information gathered from other sources about this internet outage. After being informed of their considerations and in absence of a unanimous decision, and taking into account these unprecedented circumstances, as FIDE President I made the decision to award Gold Medals to both teams.
so India has declared joint winners with Russia and for the first time in history, the Indian team won a gold medal in chess olympiad.
This victory inspired me so much! I started playing chess from the next day yes I am not good at chess for now but I know if you do what you love then you will improve every day.
I wrote this story as I want to tell everyone else that there are such small things which can inspire you to do great things in life, you just need some inspiration and motivation.
