By Joe Fernandez
India, coming from nowhere, set for dominating Chess for many decades!
Commentary And Analysis . . . The game that began in India was now witnessing the most brilliant Indian spring, renaissance rooted in the very land that gave Chess for the world.
(https://spacedaily.com/d-for-24-years-the-soviet-union-had-used-the-world-chess-championship-as-proof-of-its-intellectual-superiority-over-the-west-and-the-american-bobby-fischers-defeat-of-soviet-champion-boris-s/
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India
India’s prodigious generation — Praggnanandhaa, Gukesh, Arjun Erigaisi — and China’s Ding Liren, who became World Champion in 2023, testify that the globalised game of Chess remains, at its core, a duel of character, imagination, and nerve.
The rise of computer engines in the 21st century has redefined preparation, making deep calculation available for anyone, but the human element endures.
Chess
Mathematics and Chess are often called twin disciplines.
The twins are abstract, self-contained systems built on clear axioms and precise rules.
In mathematics, we start from definitions and postulates, then build proofs through logical deduction.
In Chess, it’s about the starting position and the laws of movement, then construct game through sequences of legal moves.
There’s pattern recognition, deep calculation, and certain kind of creative flair.
The beautiful proof, like beautiful combination, often provokes the same reaction: sudden gasp at the elegance, the inevitability, the sense that something true and previously hidden has surfaced and there’s light.
The differences explain human beings playing Chess and machines calculating.
Mathematics
Mathematics was fundamentally exploratory, cumulative, enterprise.
It seeks eternal truth about the abstract universe.
The measure of success was not victory over opponent but coherence, consistency, and explanatory power.
Chess remains adversarial.
There’s winner and loser.
Every elegant manoeuvre was aimed at specific goal: the defeat of another mind.
Better Player
Mathematics reveals what is; Chess reveals who was stronger, or Better Player that day.
Chess, given the adversarial nature, draws heavily on psychology, nerves, and the submerged mass that Nobel laureate Ernest Hemingway described viz. the invisible intuition, courage, and sheer endurance.
Mathematics, while demanding similar mental resilience, does not require staring across the board at human opponent whose anxieties, bluffs, and moments of creative brilliance become pieces in the game themselves.
Artificial Intelligence
Then, there’s Artificial Intelligence (AI).
The question that arises was whether computer can beat the human being.
The question was answered definitively over two decades ago, when IBM’s Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in 1997.
Since then, engines like Stockfish, and neural-network marvels like AlphaZero and Leela Chess Zero, have opened an unbridgeable gap.
No human can compete with top engine.
The machines win, and win routinely, by performing the visible portion of Chess — the raw calculation — the flawless memory from millions of games, the ability for seeing thirty moves ahead without fatigue, at scale no human brain can approach.
Strange Mirror
Yet this victory was Strange Mirror for the iceberg theory.
Engines dominate by turning the visible tip into an entire world.
They calculate deeply, evaluate positions with cold numerical precision, and retrieve opening lines with perfect recall.
They do not play the hidden game.
An engine has no fear of losing, no conscience about unjust victory, no exhaustion that whispers “offer draw and go home.”
It does not sense when an opponent’s spirit was wavering, nor does it deliberately steer into chaotic, psychologically charged waters for unsettling human heart.
Grandmaster
AlphaZero may display breathtaking, almost artistic creativity, but it’s creativity based on different process, for self-play and pattern matching, not the fraught, hopeful, trembling search for truth that human Grandmaster undertakes.
Computers have shown that the visible portion of Chess, amplified for human proportions, was sufficient and can surpass any human.
However, they have also, by the very limitation, illuminated the hidden expanse that makes human Chess meaningful.
Mathematics may eventually be overtaken by AI theorem provers in similar fashion, but proof found by machine will still ask the old question: is it beautiful, or merely correct?
Calculation
The Chess game won by machine was marvel of Calculation.
The Chess game won by human, in the grip of all the submerged forces that Hemingway’s iceberg hides, remains drama, story, and act of soul.
Playing Chess
The computer can beat the human, but it cannot replace what the human carries beneath the surface and that, in the end, was what we really mean by “Playing Chess.”
The sentence was everywhere, polished smooth by repetition: “Grandmasters memorise a certain number of moves. That gives them the winning edge.”
It’s comforting claim, the kind that promises shortcut.
If only we could pack enough lines into the skull, the reasoning goes, we too would see the board with champion’s eyes.
This sentence remains the tip of an iceberg, the one-eighth that Hemingway said the writer shows.
The seven-eighths underneath — the architecture of intuition, fear, creativity, history, and the stubborn will for fighting when the known world ends — was what actually decides who wins and who breaks.
Decades
The hidden mass was more vividly on display in the astonishing rise of India, a nation that came from the margins in a single generation, and stands at the very heart of Chess and that now stands poised for dominating the game for Decades.
Let’s begin with the visible peak. Yes, elite players carry enormous libraries of opening theory.
They can recite the Poisoned Pawn variation of the Najdorf, the Bayonet Attack in the King’s Indian, the subtleties of the Catalan move by move.
Soviet chess, from 1948 onward, built an empire on this peak.
They screened children, drafted collective notebooks, and produced champions like Botvinnik, Smyslov, Tal, Petrosian, and Spassky, each walking archive of prepared lines.
The surface of their dominance gleamed with the promise that the system with the bigger memory bank would always win.
Boris Spassky
When Boris Spassky sat down in Reykjavik in 1972, he had the full weight of that institutional memory behind him, a team of seconds feeding him novelties cooked in the laboratories of the sports state.
The match did not go as the surface predicted.
Bobby Fischer
Bobby Fischer arrived with small briefcase, few dog-eared notebooks, and a second who was not even a top grandmaster.
He had, of course, memorised an immense amount, he taught himself Russian purely for consuming Soviet chess journals, but the edge lay elsewhere, in the enormous invisible mass beneath solitary, obsessive preparation.
In Game 3, he uncorked novelty in the Benoni that did more than surprise Spassky; it announced different way of being chess player.
Fischer had not merely stored the line; he had understood deeply, felt its inner logic so completely, that he could improve on established theory in real time. That’s not memory. That’s conversation with the position itself.
What, then, remains submerged?
The first layer was cognitive, and dismantles the idea of “memorisation” from the inside.
Psychologists who study elite players speak of “chunking”—the mind groups pieces and pawn structures into meaningful patterns, each linked with plans, tactical motifs, and even emotional registers.
Landscape
A grandmaster recalling an opening was not hard drive retrieving sequence; he’s recognising Landscape.
The retrieval take the cue from only the splash on the surface.
The river of evaluation flows beneath: this pawn break was premature, that knight manoeuvre harmonises the pieces, the opponent’s last move reveals anxiety about the kingside.
All happens pre-verbally, instantly, and it’s the real engine of play.
When the game leaves the opening book, as every decisive game eventually does, what remains was not database but mind that can calculate, judge, and feel the way forward.
Psychological Layer
Then there’s the psychological layer, the deepest and coldest water of all.
Spassky in Reykjavik had the moves, but he did not have conscience.
After Fischer defaulted Game 2 in dispute over playing conditions, Spassky was handed free point. He confessed he could not sleep, tormented by the thought that he was now part of unjust victory.
The next game, Fischer unleashed the Benoni bomb.
There’s narrative that Fischer won because he remembered the novelty; the hidden truth was that he won because the opponent was drowning in emotion that no opening book can address.
Fischer’s genius for psychological warfare, complaints, demands, rejecting intimidation by the Soviet machine, was not sideshow. It was a core component of the edge, an ability for dragging the game into human waters where cold memory counts for little.
Historical Undercurrents
If we look deeper, there are historical undercurrents.
The Soviet Union’s 24-year grip on the world championship was never just about chess.
It was proxy for ideological superiority, the claim that the socialist system produced better minds.
When Fischer won, he did not simply defeat the man; he cracked the myth.
The Soviet machine did not vanish.
Karpov and Kasparov emerged from the same schools, blending the old collective preparation with new, sharp-edged individuality.
The real lesson of 1972 was not that one system beat another, but that the hidden human element — the courage for standing alone, rejecting the acceptance of inherited wisdom, the ability for enduring — can overturn institutional advantage.
Soviet chess was vast, but had mistaken visible peak for the whole strength.
Fischer arrived with a difference, almost entirely unseen, and changed history.
The hidden mass was more decisive than ever and India was the most compelling proof.
The engines have democratised the visible peak.
Any ambitious club player with laptop can access database that would have outcalculated the entire Soviet sports committee.
The number of Grandmasters has swelled.
It’s over 1,900, each one capable of reeling off 25 moves of theory in a dozen sharp systems.
It has never been more crowded.
Yet the nation that is rising fastest was not the one with the biggest libraries, but the one that has learned about cultivating the hidden depths.
13 Players
India, a country that barely registered on the chess map two decades ago, now has 13 players in the world’s top 100, more than any nation except the United States at 14.
The cohort was dramatically younger, hungrier, and still accelerating. They are not just winning tournaments; they are reshaping the psychological landscape of the game.
Look at the world’s ten highest-rated players in September 2025, and we see India’s fingerprints everywhere, not as a list of memory champions but as gallery of distinct human edges.
Magnus
Magnus Carlsen, at 2839, still sits at the summit, extending games beyond a hundred moves with a predator’s instinct for the opponent’s breaking point.
There’s rising Indian tide.
Praggnanandhaa
Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu, at 2785, brings worldview (Weltanschauung) forged in the engine era, fearless creativity that treats the prepared line as launchpad, not cage.
Arjun
Arjun Erigaisi, 2771, plays dynamic, unrelenting chess that thrives in the very chaos where memory runs out.
Gukesh
Gukesh Dommaraju, 2767, was already the reigning World Champion at just 18 years old, the youngest undisputed champion in history.
His title was not memory trophy; it’s the fruit of national chess culture that has internalised the hidden, teaching prodigies that the real game was fought in the depths of calculation, nerve, and not blinking.
These three are merely the tip in India.
There are others, the generation that has grown up with engines as companions, with coaches who understand that rote learning was the old Soviet mistake.
India’s success was built on the very principle Hemingway reveals: the visible moves are only the foam.
The winning edge was the hidden game, endgame technique honed through thousands of grind-it-out battles, the psychological steel forged in online blitz marathons, the courage for play human moves that the engine dislikes and the opponent dreads.
It’s the cause-and-effect rhythm of mastery.
India has planted deep seeds and integrated work: blindfolded calculation, nurtured emotional discipline, in the hunger of nation that once had no chess tradition and now sees the board as a stage for greatness.
The harvest, already visible, was the first wave.
The contradiction that bothers so many: if memory doesn’t give the edge, why do GMs spend thousands of hours memorising, resolves itself the moment we stop confusing the tip with the hidden.
Memory remains the delivery vehicle, the visible sail.
The wind that fills was understanding, and the hull that keeps the whole vessel steady in rough seas was psychological resilience, creative courage, and the sheer stamina for calculating dozen moves deep when the known world ends.
The player who has only the sail will be blown over in the first squall.
The player with the full, invisible mass beneath the waterline can sail into any position and trust that the ship will hold.
India’s young grandmasters have built that hull.
Hemingway believed that the writer who knows the deeper truth can omit and make the reader feel as strongly as if it was stated.
Chess works the same way.
We do not see the grandmaster’s seven-eighths when replaying their game on a screen.
We see the moves viz. the visible foam.
If we sit in the tournament hall, if we watch the eyes flicker during the critical think, if we feel the silence that gathers around a time scramble, we sense the hidden.
It’s the weight of all the lost games that taught lessons, the lonely nights with chessboard and notebook, the history of nation pressing on single pair of shoulders, the courage for playing move that the engine dislikes and the human opponent dreads.
In India, that weight was now shared fire, and it’s spreading.
The winning edge was not number.
It’s way of being.
The sentence that started it all, “Grandmasters memorise certain number of moves”, was merely the sparkle of sunlight on the surface, beautiful and blinding.
The hidden game glides silently, and riding that current, coming from nowhere, was India steering itself toward long, golden era of domination. They navigate the hidden. — TJT
Longtime Borneo watcher Joe Fernandez has been writing for many years on both sides of the Southeast Asia Sea. He should not be mistaken for a namesake formerly with the Daily Express in Kota Kinabalu. JF keeps a Blog under FernzTheGreat, as jurist (legal scholar), on the nature of human relationships.
DISCLAIMER: The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Jesselton Times.
