The Boy’s Gambit: Inside the world of Nihal Sarin, a chess champion at the age of 10
Written by Nihal Koshie | Published on:March 15, 2015 1:00 am
If you search for Nihal Sarin on YouTube, you will find a link to a 2 minute and 32-second-long clip of a match at the World Junior Chess Championship held in Pune in October. He is the scrawny kid in a black blazer pacing about, restlessly. Across the table is Kriebel Tadeas of Czech Republic, a decade older and an international chess master. But 10-year-old Nihal has Kriebel thinking hard, and as he shuffles around, he looks as if he might be trying to intimidate his much-older opponent. “But I was only thinking about my next move. Walking away or looking away helps me refocus,” Nihal says. The game ended in a long-fought draw, a result against a higher-rated opponent that enhanced Nihal’s reputation. Two days earlier, Nihal had stunned a higher-ranked player, Jonathan Westerberg of Sweden, also an international master, in a 94-move game.
Like all children, Nihal finds it difficult to sit still. As a toddler, too, he was a bundle of nervous energy. During summer holidays, Salam A and his wife Shijin, a doctor couple then based in Arpookara, a village in Kottayam district, found it difficult to keep their five-year-old son occupied. He soon lost interest in stacking colourful building blocks on top of each other. To his parents’ surprise, it was a chess board that finally held his attention. His maternal grandfather, AA Ummar, taught him the rules of the game. The early games between the two would end with the grandson bawling when he lost his queen or was check-mated. But once Nihal overcame the disappointment of a loss, he would be keen to start anew. Within a fortnight of learning the basics, Nihal had found a way to beat his grandfather.
A few months later, he started formal coaching in chess in his school. He was the only six-year-old in the school chess group that had students from Class V and above. But the principal was ready to make an exception. “By the time he was in Class I, he could recite tables from 1 to 16. The teachers were impressed with his ability to grasp difficult concepts and word had got around. So the principal agreed to allow him to attend chess classes,” Sarin says, when we meet him in his house in Thrissur.
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