What does it take to win a game of chess? Good pattern recognition ability, sharp memory, exceptional calculation, or just intuition? If one asks Divya Deshmukh today, she would say none of those. At times, being plain lucky is enough.
On Tuesday, a “rather lucky” Divya dismantled compatriot R. Vaishali in just 26 moves in the second round of the FIDE Women’s Grand Prix’s Pune leg.
All Divya – the youngest participant in the event who received a wild card — had to do was provoke the India No.3 into one mistake. In a sharp Ruy Lopez game, Divya went for Vaishali’s knight’s pair in exchange for her own knight and bishop as the game hung in balance.
Vaishali moved her bishop to g4 on the 17th move, looking to attack the white queen, but when Divya went for a counterattack of her own with Nxf6, looking to take the Black queen, it was pretty much over for the Chennai Grandmaster.
The misplaced bishop move was so detrimental for Vaishali that the engine evaluation jumped from a +0.4 advantage for Divya to a winning +4.0 edge. It allowed Divya to exchange queens and Vaishali resigned on the 26th move.
Although it was a blunder by Vaishali that gave Divya her second point in as many games, she was lucky to study the same variation just five minutes before the game.
“I was rather lucky that I glanced through just this variation, five minutes before the game. Didn’t expect the game to get over so quickly,” said Divya after the game.
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It was a significant victory for the International Master against a pedigreed GM. She now finds herself in joint lead alongside China’s Zhu Jiner with a perfect start to the tournament after beating Bulgaria’s Nurgyul Salimova in the first round. The top-seed Jiner beat Mongolia’s Munguntuul Batkhuyag in the second round after prevailing over India’s Harika Dronavalli.
While Divya is trying to become the fourth Indian woman to become a Grandmaster, GM Abhijit Kunte believes that for a player of Divya’s calibre, the goals should be higher.
“She should try and break into the Women’s World Championship cycle. And she should look at breaking into the top 5 in the world rankings. Look at Viswanathan Anand, who became a World Junior Champion in 1987 and was soon among the world’s best. Divya also became a world junior champion last year. So now she needs to chase this,” Kunte told The Indian Express.
Kunte led the Indian women’s team to a historic gold medal at the Budapest Olympiad last year. At the same tournament, Divya won an individual gold medal on board three with an impressive 9.5/11 record.
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She followed up with a win at the 2024 World Junior Girls’ Championship in Gandhinagar. Her consistent run throughout the last year propelled her to be India’s No. 2 in women’s rankings, trailing only Humpy, and took her closer to the GM title.
After the 2025 Women’s World Cup, the Grand Prix series is the most high-profile tournament in this cycle with two Candidates spots at stakes.
The Pune event, which has an €80,000 (77 lakh) prize fund, is the fifth of six events in the 2024-2025 Women’s Grand Prix cycle. Based on the event’s final standings, players also earn Grand Prix points. The two with the most points at the end of the series get spots in the next Women’s Candidates Tournament.
The other three encounters – India’s Koneru Humpy vs Salome Melia, Polina Shuvalova vs Salimova and Harika vs Alina Kashlinskaya – ended in draws.
(With inputs from Amit Kamath)
