BENGALURU: Who doesn’t love a good underdog story? Everyone does, right? Nobody had Ganges Grandmasters finishing on top of anything when Season 4 of the Global Chess League (GCL) began in Bengaluru just less than a fortnight ago. Six teams, a league stage so tight, and a final that only got decided after the very last match was played on Saturday evening.With Grandmasters like Ian Nepomniachtchi, Levon Aronian, Leinier Domínguez and Leon Luke Mendonca, and International Masters like Polina Shuvalova and Stavroula Tsolakidou, it was a diverse side, one few expected to go all the way.By Sunday, as the confetti cannons went off, it was Ganges Grandmasters, not the defending champions APL Pipers, not the team with Magnus Carlsen on the Icon board, standing at the top of the podium.7-5 remained the aggregate score by which Ganges Grandmasters beat the Pipers across the two-leg final, having drawn the first leg 3-3, where the Grandmasters played with the White pieces.With the Black, though, Ian Nepomniachtchi pounced on a positional error from Carlsen, refusing to give the world number one any route back into the game. And as the five-time world champion’s position collapsed, so did the Pipers’ hopes of retaining the title. Behind the scenes, however, the triumph is about so much more than a good underdog story.
A ‘not a full-time coach’ at the helm
Adhiban Baskaran, who, by the admission of all the players in the team, played an integral role in keeping it all together throughout the campaign, is not a coach.“I’m not a full-time coach, so I wanted to clarify. I am like a professional player,” the 34-year-old Grandmaster told reporters on Sunday. “But this time, I was free. I didn’t have any tournaments in September, so I just wanted to be part of something great.”That “something great” turned into a maiden GCL title on debut as a coach, a fact Baskaran still seemed slightly stunned by.“To win the GCL Season 4 on debut is amazing, and something I’m very proud of,” he added.What makes his version of the story worth telling isn’t the tactics or the pairings. It’s what he brought into the dugout that had nothing to do with chess at all.With his humour, superstition, and a level of emotional investment, he uplifted the overall spirit of the team after a topsy-turvy start to the tournament, including two wins and two losses in the opening four games.Take the nickname, for example. Somewhere along the way, Baskaran started handing out monikers to the squad, and one of them, nevertheless, became more popular than the others.Earlier in the tournament, Greek chess player Stavroula Tsolakidou revealed that Baskaran had prepared her for a game with a file titled “Prep for the Greek Goddess!”“I was trying to come up with nicknames for everyone, and that’s how I came up with this nickname, Greek Goddess,” he said. It became a name that would end up being shouted across the venue by the time she clinched the title-sealing win over Koneru Humpy and picked up the Player of the Tournament award, complete with a Jawa motorbike.“I didn’t expect it would actually become so popular in such a short span,” Baskaran admitted.Then there was the fasting. After a mid-tournament loss, Baskaran quietly made himself a promise.“I didn’t have breakfast, I didn’t have lunch, and I told myself if the team is not winning, I will also not have dinner,” he said with a smile after Sunday’s victory. “And they won. So I could actually have dinner.”What started as a one-off superstition calcified into a five-day ritual.“I thought, okay, why fix something which doesn’t break? So I started to fast every lunch. I didn’t have lunch for the past five days, also with the thought that I would not have dinner if the team didn’t win. But luckily, my team was always winning, and they were helping me, so I could at least have dinner,” he revealed.By the end of the tournament, he was only half-joking about the toll it had taken. “My stomach is literally crying now,” he remarked.
An accidental nod to MS Dhoni
Baskaran’s calm in the dugout, it turns out, had a specific origin, and it arrived by text message, from his father, in the middle of the rough patch earlier in the season.“After the second day, I think we lost one match,” Baskaran recalled. “And my father sent me this message that, you know, you just try to be like one of your role models, Dhoni. He messaged, ‘Try to be like Captain Cool, your role model.’ So I was like, yeah, I will try to be like that.”“In fact, I chose my (jersey) number seven for Ronaldo,” he said. “But actually, Dhoni’s number is also seven. So there’s an inside joke about Dhoni; the credit always walks back to Dhoni.”
Pressed on whether that same reflexive credit-giving applied here, the way, say, cricketer Hardik Pandya once attributed India wins to Dhoni’s mere presence in the dressing room, Baskaran deflected the comparison entirely.“No, no. Here I feel it’s because of my team,” he added. “I think they played very well.”Whatever the jersey number said, Baskaran’s dugout stayed visibly, deliberately calm, right up until it had a trophy to celebrate.
A childhood hero, now a champion teammate
Baskaran admits that the real reason he chose to coach the GCL outfit during his time off had little to do with money, fame, or anything material.“Levon (Aronian) has been my hero for as long as I can remember,” Baskaran revealed. “Ever since he won the World Junior in Goa, I’ve been a big fan of him.” Getting to coach him, rather than simply admire him from a distance, was its own reward. “Getting to understand how the players are, the psychology, how they prepare, that’s something I really wanted to know. So that was the reason I wanted to be part of this team.”Aronian, for his part, returned the affection when asked about Baskaran directly.“He’s such a friendly, such a calm and pleasant person,” Aronian said after the trophy celebration. “I’ve known him since he was very young, even our fathers are friends.”
Throughout the tournament, this did not look like a group of mercenaries assembled for a tournament, as confirmed by Aronian as well.“I think we have very relaxed egos, less structure in a team, and everybody can make a joke. There is no limit to jokes. I just felt like it was some family type of experience. I will treasure those days,” the veteran Grandmaster admitted.Russian Grandmaster and the team’s icon player Nepomniachtchi, whose demolition of Carlsen effectively won the title, echoed the same sentiment from a very different starting point, a player who admitted he’d arrived in Bengaluru unsure of his own form after a rough year of rating losses.“I wasn’t sure what my form was at the moment,” he said. “But I was really pleasantly surprised with the atmosphere inside the team. Despite different ages, different cultures, we really found points of connection. It was always very healthy, very jokey. I think it really made the difference.”
‘The funniest team’ wins it finally
Going by their social media, one can see the Ganges Grandmasters players often indulging in physical sports like padel, golf, and basketball after their gruelling round of matches in GCL. Perhaps that built the team spirit.“I think it’s more about team spirit,” Adhiban said. “Always joking, always having fun, I would actually say we are the funniest team. Maybe that’s one of the reasons.”Nobody had Ganges Grandmasters in their top two.By Sunday night, the top belonged to the man who led the underdogs, now holding a trophy, still fasting, still cracking jokes in the “funniest team” of the GCL’s fourth edition.
