The Battle of the Board - Behind the Scenes

Ding Liren, Vishy Anand, Vidit Gujrathi, Praggnanandhaa, and I – what do we all have in common? Rain or shine, we regularly attend chess tournaments, sitting through hours of gameplay, and at the end, nodding at people with a smile, irrespective of the result. But unlike them, to move the pieces around on the board, I'd need unnaturally long arms that might have to bend at odd angles and sometimes navigate through walls that separate the players' hall and the parents' waiting area.

Being a chess mom is much less glamorous than one would imagine. For one, you don't get to see your child play as you would if they were playing cricket or badminton. Sure, there are live telecasts on certain websites. However, I learned only much later (than I'd like to admit in public) that such privileges are reserved only for the first 5 or 10 boards. Until your child reaches one of those 'top' tables, you'll have to make do with their hurriedly scribbled, blotched, scratched, and incomplete scoresheets they bring back after the games.

The waiting rooms for parents are usually top-notch – you might occasionally be lucky enough to find a roof overhead or luxurious furnishings such as slightly faded plastic stools or chairs (perhaps standing in solidarity with color diversity?). They might have a slightly broken backrest or armrest, but why would any rational person lean back on the backrest or rest their arms on the armrest, I fail to understand. You can enjoy the comfort of the company of 8 to 10 other sweaty, slightly sunburnt prodigy-producing parents and coaches, seated back-to-back, side-to-back, or even arm-over-arm squeezed under small patches of broken shadow cast by a few parched trees scattered around the venue.

A good number of these individuals can be caught staring at their phones – which is what a good number of any good people are caught doing these days. Some are lost in parallel realms, their noses buried deep in books thicker than medieval castle walls. And then there's the I-must-stay-adequately-hydrated population taking swigs from their own private flasks - or bottles as we muggles call it (I've had my doubts that the flasks secretly contain Polyjuice potion and the drinkers are paid babysitters filling in for the insufferably bored parents/coaches).  Not to mention the I-eat-when-I’m bored lot munching on homemade (that sometimes look like they have been half sat-on) sandwiches or digestive biscuits or toasted almonds or anything else typically labelled ‘healdhy’ as they wait for their cerebral champs to come back with a grim or a grinning face.

Real-life sample of a scoresheet

Once your child is back from the game, you'll have the excitement of decoding the scoresheets. Reading them can be as complicated as the game itself when your child's handwriting makes every alphabet curiously resemble every other English alphabet. Some people resort to approaching their child's opponent to ask for their scoresheets in order to scout for clues and deduce missing bits of mission-critical information. In the chess world, it's often encouraged to convert the game into .pgn files reading the scoresheets by using simple-as-calculus apps meant for the purpose. 

The best part of the entire ordeal is listening to your child excitedly jabber nonstop about how they used a newly learned tactic to capture the opponent's bishop on g3, how the opponent forked their pawn and knight with their queen on b6, and how they still managed to finish off the opponent with a brilliant mate-in-4. Nodding along, throwing in a couple of questions like 'wow, really?' and 'are you serious?!' and occasionally sprinkling in a few deeper questions like 'did your opponent blunder?' and 'what opening did you play?' or 'did you finally get the dream position today?' might make you seem like the intelligent, dedicated Chess Mom that you are.

Image for illustration
purpose only. 

At the end of every tournament, which can run from anywhere between 1 to 5 days, parents (and children) are taught invaluable life lessons of patience and tolerance for hunger, while building resilience among the older population for whiny, grumpy, and genuinely tired children. With grumbling stomachs one must inevitably learn to spar with the tiny, abhorrent needles extending from a mosquito's face while they wait for the trophies and medals (which are, much to everybody’s admiration, distributed well before the clock strikes midnight). And just when you're promising yourself that you won't register for another tournament for at least a couple of weeks (so that you can live the life of a normal parent, pamper yourself with a few late hours of Netflix binge-watching and unhealthy snacks instead of being precariously perched on poorly moulded pieces of busted plastic or on the least dirty patch on the ground), you find yourself making the payment for the next U-07 tournament scheduled in 3 days. 

Behold, what other path shall a parent tread when their child's heart is captivated by the art of chess?