There’s a hilarious clip from four years ago which has made a comeback on the internet in recent weeks. The clip has Viswanathan Anand and his wife Aruna good-naturedly ribbing each other as they talk to Vidit Gujrathi about all things chess. It is in this 2021 clip that Aruna, who has also played the role of manager for the five-time world champion for most of their marriage, decides to give Vidit some marriage advice while also roasting her husband sitting next to her.
“Our honeymoon was in a chess tournament, you know that right?” Aruna asks Vidit, who promptly bursts into laughter.
Aruna is referring to the pair travelling to Dortmund a month after getting married in 1996 to play in a super-elite tournament. Anand had ended up tied for first place with Vladimir Kramnik, with the duo ending a full point ahead of the rest of the field. But taking her to a chess tournament for their honeymoon is something that Aruna still won’t let Anand forget. Clearly, like on the chess board, there are some moves you cannot take back.
“You should never do that to your wife, Vidit! Very bad idea,” Aruna continues in a put-on faux-stern tone before turning to Anand and saying: “You should give him advice no, he’s a young boy!”
The reason that clip has now gone viral is because Vidit is on course to ignore that piece of sound advice from Aruna and fly with his soon-to-be-spouse Nidhi to Paris just one day after they get hitched next month. Vidit will be playing in the second event of the Freestyle Grand Slam Chess Tour in Paris, where he will join compatriots and Chess Olympiad gold medal-winning teammates Gukesh, Praggnanandhaa and Arjun Erigaisi in the elite 10-player field.
“Paris is better than Dortmund, I think even Vishy will agree,” Vidit chuckled in a ChessBase India interview after he qualified for the Paris Freestyle event last week, scything through an elite field — that included former world champion Ding Liren, Richard Rapport, Nodirbek Abdusattorov, Levon Aronian, and Wei Yi — in the play-in qualification event.
Back when Anand was tying the knot, the prevailing dogma in chess was that when you get married, the first thing that takes a hit is your ELO rating, as he wrote in his autobiography. But just as Anand defied that rule by finishing on top in Dortmund, Vidit breezed his way to secure the sole qualification spot in the play-in last week. In fact, so effortless was Vidit’s win that he did not need a single tiebreaker to be played in any of his clashes.
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“For me, it was very unexpected that I would do so well in this tournament because I haven’t been practising chess for the last three or four months. I have just been busy with other stuff (like planning for the upcoming wedding). So it was a very pleasant surprise, it went really smooth. Before the tournament began, I was not ready, I felt rusty. I thought it could be very embarrassing if it doesn’t go well,” Vidit said on the Chess.com broadcast after securing his win.
Far from embarrassing, Vidit seemed to be playing the whole event with an absence of pressure on his face, which is uncharacteristic for him at big-ticket events.
In fact, Vidit later spoke about how he had barely even had time to think about chess over the two days he had played in qualification games to secure his spot. He had woken up at 5 am on the day of the Ding and Pranesh games and had spent seven hours on a shoot. Between the two games, he was packing for a trip the next day to Sri Badrika Ashram in Himachal Pradesh. The second day saw him wake up at 6 am, fly to Chandigarh, then travel five hours by car to the ashram.
Despite all of this, he still won without breaking into a sweat.
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“After being out of practice for the last few months to winning this! Vidit 3.0 has just begun,” Vidit’s fiance Nidhi declared on social media.
Vidit Gujrathi’s renaissance
The 30-year-old Vidit has had a very topsy-turvy last few years. He was seen as the successor to Anand and Harikrishna before players like Gukesh, Pragg, Nihal Sarin and Arjun Erigaisi almost burst onto the scene overnight, speeding past developmental milestones that other grandmasters had needed years to pass.
So speedy was the rise of the Gukesh-Pragg-Arjun troika that Vidit even admitted in a candid interview with The Indian Express that he feared: “Is my career done? Am I history?” This brutal self-administered reality check came somewhere during the Asian Games in 2023, when Vidit was trying to rack his brains about when he had last won a chess event. His mind had to race all the way back to the Biel Chess Festival. In 2019!
“I was getting quite discouraged (by the results). As a player I was losing a bit of hope in my journey,” Vidit had said.
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Then, Vidit had found a fresh gulp of hope: by winning the FIDE Grand Swiss tournament — one of the toughest open tournaments in the world — he had secured a spot at the prestigious eight-player Candidates tournament that is held to figure out a challenger to the world champion. Vidit had said that the win had ushered in a new era in his career: a Vidit 2.0, he had branded it.
Now as he prepares for Vidit 3.0, the odds are stacked against him. There are probably limited invitations in his inbox from super elite tournaments with most organisers preferring Gukesh, Pragg and Arjun. Chess is becoming a teenager’s game.
But expect Vidit to endure. And expect him to thrive in a format like Freestyle Chess where you can show up for your game without having spent the entire morning in painstaking prep and still win.
