There’s a hilarious clip from 4 years in the past which has made a comeback on the web in current weeks. The clip has Viswanathan Anand and his spouse Aruna good-naturedly ribbing one another as they discuss to Vidit Gujrathi about all issues chess. It’s on this 2021 clip that Aruna, who has additionally performed the function of supervisor for the five-time world champion for many of their marriage, decides to present Vidit some marriage recommendation whereas additionally roasting her husband sitting subsequent to her.
“Our honeymoon was in a chess event, you already know that proper?” Aruna asks Vidit, who promptly bursts into laughter.
Aruna is referring to the pair travelling to Dortmund a month after getting married in 1996 to play in a super-elite event. Anand had ended up tied for first place with Vladimir Kramnik, with the duo ending a full level forward of the remainder of the sector. However taking her to a chess event for his or her honeymoon is one thing that Aruna nonetheless received’t let Anand neglect. Clearly, like on the chess board, there are some strikes you can not take again.
“You must by no means do this to your spouse, Vidit! Very dangerous concept,” Aruna continues in a put-on faux-stern tone earlier than turning to Anand and saying: “You must give him recommendation no, he’s a younger boy!”
The explanation that clip has now gone viral is as a result of Vidit is on track to disregard that piece of sound recommendation from Aruna and fly along with his soon-to-be-spouse Nidhi to Paris simply in the future after they get hitched subsequent month. Vidit will likely be enjoying within the second occasion of the Freestyle Grand Slam Chess Tour in Paris, the place he’ll be part of compatriots and Chess Olympiad gold medal-winning teammates Gukesh, Praggnanandhaa and Arjun Erigaisi within the elite 10-player discipline.
“Paris is best than Dortmund, I feel even Vishy will agree,” Vidit chuckled in a ChessBase India interview after he certified for the Paris Freestyle occasion final week, scything by an elite discipline — that included former world champion Ding Liren, Richard Rapport, Nodirbek Abdusattorov, Levon Aronian, and Wei Yi — within the play-in qualification occasion.
Again when Anand was tying the knot, the prevailing dogma in chess was that while you get married, the very first thing that takes successful is your ELO score, as he wrote in his autobiography. However simply as Anand defied that rule by ending on prime in Dortmund, Vidit breezed his approach to safe the only real qualification spot within the play-in final week. In actual fact, so easy was Vidit’s win that he didn’t want a single tiebreaker to be performed in any of his clashes.
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“For me, it was very sudden that I might achieve this effectively on this event as a result of I haven’t been practising chess for the final three or 4 months. I’ve simply been busy with different stuff (like planning for the upcoming wedding ceremony). So it was a really nice shock, it went actually easy. Earlier than the event started, I used to be not prepared, I felt rusty. I believed it may very well be very embarrassing if it doesn’t go effectively,” Vidit mentioned on the Chess.com broadcast after securing his win.
Removed from embarrassing, Vidit gave the impression to be enjoying the entire occasion with an absence of stress on his face, which is uncharacteristic for him at big-ticket occasions.
In actual fact, Vidit later spoke about how he had barely even had time to consider chess over the 2 days he had performed in qualification video games to safe his spot. He had woken up at 5 am on the day of the Ding and Pranesh video games and had spent seven hours on a shoot. Between the 2 video games, he was packing for a visit the following day to Sri Badrika Ashram in Himachal Pradesh. The second day noticed him get up at 6 am, fly to Chandigarh, then journey 5 hours by automotive to the ashram.
Regardless of all of this, he nonetheless received with out breaking right into a sweat.
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“After being out of form for the previous few months to profitable this! Vidit 3.0 has simply begun,” Vidit’s fiance Nidhi declared on social media.
Vidit Gujrathi’s renaissance
The 30-year-old Vidit has had a really topsy-turvy previous couple of years. He was seen because the successor to Anand and Harikrishna earlier than gamers like Gukesh, Pragg, Nihal Sarin and Arjun Erigaisi virtually burst onto the scene in a single day, rushing previous developmental milestones that different grandmasters had wanted years to go.
So speedy was the rise of the Gukesh-Pragg-Arjun troika that Vidit even admitted in a candid interview with The Indian Categorical that he feared: “Is my profession carried out? Am I historical past?” This brutal self-administered actuality examine got here someplace through the Asian Video games in 2023, when Vidit was attempting to rack his brains about when he had final received a chess occasion. His thoughts needed to race all the way in which again to the Biel Chess Competition. In 2019!
“I used to be getting fairly discouraged (by the outcomes). As a participant I used to be dropping a little bit of hope in my journey,” Vidit had mentioned.
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Then, Vidit had discovered a contemporary gulp of hope: by profitable the FIDE Grand Swiss event — one of many hardest open tournaments on this planet — he had secured a spot on the prestigious eight-player Candidates event that’s held to determine a challenger to the world champion. Vidit had mentioned that the win had ushered in a brand new period in his profession: a Vidit 2.0, he had branded it.
Now as he prepares for Vidit 3.0, the chances are stacked towards him. There are in all probability restricted invites in his inbox from tremendous elite tournaments with most organisers preferring Gukesh, Pragg and Arjun. Chess is changing into a youngster’s recreation.
However count on Vidit to endure. And count on him to thrive in a format like Freestyle Chess the place you’ll be able to present up to your recreation with out having spent your entire morning in painstaking prep and nonetheless win.