Chess: Sponsors neglect Indian chess players
Radhika Iyer, TS Sudhir
Tuesday, December 5, 2006 (Hyderabad)
Koneru Humpy let her knights, bishops and pawns to do the talking in Doha.
India’s queen in the world of chess had suffered the ignominy of her sponsor dropping her last year in favour of Rahul Dravid.
“For her to win the women world championship, we are planning to appoint a second, a foreign trainer but the cost is very high,” said Koneru Ashok, Koneru Humpy’s Father and Coach.
Humpy is not the only Indian grandmaster to get a raw deal. Just a year ago, Grandmaster P Harikrishna had told NDTV that he may be forced to quit the game if he did not get a sponsor.
The full article can be read here. 
Chess Daily News from Susan Polgar
What’s the deal?
Nearly every Indian I’ve spoken with is totally Bananand’s for Anand, but it seems no one gives a hump about Humpy and she’s what, #3 woman in the world? Very strange.
I hope he gets support so he doesnt have to go back to his job at Dell.
Susan:
Thanks for highlighting the issue. Maybe, somebody will step up to sponsor Humpy.
As far as I know, sponsors sponsor players not from the goodness of their hearts, but because of some perceived financial advantage. Chessbase will sell a lots of copies of Fritz for example. Chess lost a lot of popularity in the last couple of decades. ONly chessplayers pay attention to what is happening in a chess world, and a very few others. Yesterday something significant happened (DF10 defeated Kramnik), yet I have not found a word about it in the popular media in USA. If there was one, it was somewhere hidden in some insignificant section. This doesn’t help entities to become donors and/or sponsors.
Therefore, first chess itself must regain its popularity. Susan does her part, but it will take much more than that.
Gabor
Apart from cricket( Rahul Dravid’s game ) people aren’t much interested about any other game( maybe soccer) in India….Its a pity that talented players are forced to quit for this reason….
It is quite surprising for me to hear the lack of sponsorship of chess in India. Whenever I search on Google News for news on chess, invariably most of the coverage I find are from Indian news websites, so I naturally thought that with all that chess coverage, surely there would be many Indian chess sponsors.
The problem of sponsorship has to do with popularity of the sport and the player. You show me US chess players who are sought after by the US media.
Speaking from personal experience, chess in India is in much better shape than it used to be 25-30 years ago. Today, people do get a chance to play in strong tournaments locally and worldwide. See the number of GMs and IMs in India. Earlier, it was hard to find IM/GM norm tournaments to play, so people never got too far in the international arena.
Disclaimer: I love chess.
Rahul Dravid is a cricket super-star, and given how popular cricket is in that part of the world, must have close to a billion fans (i.e., almost every single person there). That’s what sponsors want.
Dravid may not be Diego Maradona, but he is certainly the David Becham of Indian cricket.
Do we really expect the top US chess player to get comparable attention as Shaq? Heck, even the best track and field athletes here don’t get much attention.
Humpy and her team need to figure out how to get sponsorship and stop whining.
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