From Vishy to Gukesh: The Rising Star of the Indian Chess Scene

Bengaluru: Radoslaw Wojtaszek, then just 21 years old and rated 2600, received a surprising invitation to join Viswanathan Anand's World Championship team after playing against the Indian legend in a Bundesliga game in 2007, which ended in a draw. Becoming a member of Anand's core group seconds, Wojtaszek played a key role in three of Anand's five World Championship victories.

He spent most of this year helping another Indian on his World Championship journey.

As a member of Gukesh’s team of seconds for the Candidates and the World Championship match, Wojtaszek was initially curious about how a teenager would handle such a high-stakes affair.

“When I was working with Vishy, he was a well-established player who was older and had a compact repertoire. So, in that sense, what he needed was more obvious. But Guki needed something different. For me, it was a challenge to understand him at first. I was also not sure how he would approach a match like this because he’s still so young. The Game 1 loss came as a shock to all of us. But the way he handled things after that left me very impressed.”

During the match, Wojtaszek said that he kept an eye on the daily game analysis that former world champion Magnus Carlsen did for his ‘TakeTake Take’ app. “I tried to hear what Magnus was saying because I really value his opinion. His insights come with experience, and I thought it was very smart to follow him. On some days, it was also reassuring to know that my thoughts about a particular game were similar to Magnus’s. Of course, it’s not like we were making choices and decisions based on what he was saying, but any information from such a strong player can be useful.”

Wojtaszek, together with Pentala Harikrishna and Vincent Keymer, camped in the south of Spain during the match. “This is also a system which Magnus came up with, I suppose. He had just his trainer Peter Heine Nielsen with him for matches, and the rest of the team would be hidden elsewhere. It’s not easy to spend 23 days living with two other players in a foreign country unless there’s a certain bond, which we luckily shared. It was a lot of work, very little sleep, and since Gaju (Grzegorz Gajewski, Gukesh’s trainer) and I have known each other for decades, we didn’t really have to talk much to know what was needed of each other. Hari brought experience to the team, and his understanding of Chinese players was very helpful. Vincent, though really young, is already a top player, and he worked really hard to find creative ideas. I was reminded of how I was once the ‘kid’ of the group in Vishy’s team.”

“It was Gaju and Vincent who were preparing most of the interesting ideas. My job was to develop these ideas a little bit further so that there’s some control over them. The last few rounds were tough because we were kind of running out of ideas that had been prepared before the match. A lot of credit should go to Gaju because he’s very creative, and could come up with an idea when we needed it. Of course, eventually, it was up to Guki to decide if he wanted to use a certain idea or not. Though he isn’t too experienced, Guki has a fantastic feel for what should be done at a certain moment, and he was able to read Ding (Liren) quite well. He was able to pass on his inputs to us which were very valuable,” says the 37-year-old Polish GM.

Preparation has evolved since Wojtaszek’s days as a 20-something-year-old second in Anand’s team. “Back then, it was more important to prepare some objectively good ideas. Now, you have to think about who you’re preparing the idea for... Someone like Gukesh, for instance, likes something a little bit more aggressive. Against Ding it made sense to play a long game, so we had to prepare ideas suitable for that approach.”

In Game 14, when Gukesh was pushing in an objectively drawn position, an email landed from Gajewski to the rest of the team, discussing a line that could be interesting to play in the tiebreaks the following day. A Ding blunder led to the match and title being abruptly decided .

“When you look back, it was the right call for Gukesh to play on, in all those games and positions when the engines said he was overdoing it. He was constantly putting Ding under pressure. Somewhere, it all added up, perhaps, and led to the final blunder.”

“I love that I got to work both with Vishy and Guki. They’re obviously very different. But they’re both extraordinary. One thing perhaps which is similar with both is that once the process of preparation for the match began, they were completely into it.”

For both Wojtaszek and Harikrishna, who are fathers of toddlers, staying away from home for weeks couldn’t have been easy. “My son is one,” says Wojtaszek, “so I wanted to be home after the match in time for his first moves.”

ENDS