Coffee for Dessert

The Tech Mahindra Global Chess League, 2024. Six teams of six players each. Thirty-six players, and not one of them gets to play alone.

Look at the rosters. Magnus Carlsen and Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu on the Alpine SG Pipers. Hikaru Nakamura and Jan-Krzysztof Duda on the American Gambits. Viswanathan Anand and Arjun Erigaisi on the Ganges Grandmasters. Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and Vidit Gujrathi on the upGrad Mumba Masters. Anish Giri and Nodirbek Abdusattorov on the PBG Alaskan Knights. Alireza Firouzja and Wei Yi on the Triveni Continental Kings.

Those are the names at the top. Keep reading. Every roster runs six deep. Hou Yifan and Kateryna Lagno. Humpy Koneru and Harika Dronavalli. Alexandra Kosteniuk and Valentina Gunina. There is no easy board on any of these teams.

The schedule is packed. The first matches were set for October 3, 2024, with three or four matches a day, the earliest at 7:15 AM CDT. Team against team, every day, through October 11, the last date on the schedule.

Here is the Zone take. In a team event, your board is your job. You do not control what happens on the board next to you. You control your moves, your clock and your result. Your team gets the sum.

That changes how you think. A win on the top board does not save you on yours. Your teammate winning does not give you permission to play loose. Six people each doing their job is how a team wins.

You can play this way at home. Join a club team. Play a school match. Sit down at board four and play it like it’s the only board in the room. Because for you, it is.

Then look up when your game is done, and see what your team built.

I wish you the best of luck!!

The Chess Zone – Coffee For Dessert.