Vidit Gujrathi interview: “There were moments I thought ‘is my career done? Am I hory’?” | Chess News

About a month back, around the Asian Games, Vidit Gujrathi decided to take stock of his career. In particular, he was trying to remember when he had last won a tournament. His mind stopped at a few junctions as he journeyed back in time, but those turned out to be either one-off games — like his win over Peter Svidler at the Maharashtra Challenge Match 2023 — or second-placed finishes. Finally, he found it: his title at the Biel Chess Festival, which had come four years ago in 2019.At the recently-concluded FIDE Grand Swiss tournament — one of the toughest open tournaments in the world — Vidit ended that streak with a stunning comeback. He started off as the 15th seed and shrugged off a defeat in the opening round to claim the title and earned a spot at the prestigious eight-man Candidates tournament, which will be held in April 2024 to anoint a challenger for World Champion Ding Liren.
“Winning the title means a lot more than sealing a Candidates spot. It has been a while since I had won an event of such stature. In fact, not even such a stature! Won any tournament! There were decent performances here and there, but no titles. So this win was reassuring, I got a lot of confidence from it, because I was getting quite discouraged. As a player I was losing a bit of hope in my journey,” he tells The Indian Express.
“There was a thought sometimes, ‘is this worth doing?’ But I decided, I have to do this for the next couple of years. There was no conflict in my mind that I had to stop playing,” Vidit says. (FIDE/Anna Shtourman)
When Vidit speaks of decent performances in the past few years, he means the win he had over former World Champion Magnus Carlsen in a chess league; the triumph over World Championship contender Ian Nepomniachtchi at the FIDE World Cup, and making it to the quarters of the FIDE World Cup in successive editions.
“That win against Nepo at the World Cup was good, but the job was to reach the Candidates. At the Asian Games in Hangzhou, I couldn’t even finish on the podium while I had gone there hoping to win gold. There were moments of brilliance (over the years). But I couldn’t capitalise on them. I knew I was doing something right, but it just wasn’t adding up. It left a bitter taste,” admits Vidit.
Festering doubts
Over the recent years, as those sparks of brilliance repeatedly fizzed out without igniting into something bigger, self-doubt crept in.
“There was a thought sometimes, ‘is this worth doing?’ But I decided, I have to do this for the next couple of years. There was no conflict in my mind that I had to stop playing,” he says.
One of those bitter pills of self-doubt came at the Chess Olympiad last year, when the India A team, with Vidit in it, finished fourth. “Something was off! There was something fundamentally wrong which I had to fix. I knew I was better than what the results were saying about me.”

At the recent Tata Steel Chess India event in Kolkata, Vidit had said during a ceremony how it was not long ago that he used to be youngest player at the Indian team’s national camp for tournaments like the Olympiad and Asian Games. Then, just before the Tata Steel event, as the Indian team huddled in Kolkata for a camp ahead of Hangzhou 2023, he found himself as the second oldest player in the camp.
“Post-COVID when the youngsters started doing really well — their results were well deserved, of course — but for me it was a little hard to normalise to that in the beginning. I wondered: is my time done?”
One of those bitter pills of self-doubt came at the Chess Olympiad last year, when the India A team, with Vidit in it, finished fourth. “Something was off! There was something fundamentally wrong which I had to fix. I knew I was better than what the results were saying about me.” (FIDE/Anna Shtourman)
The rise of teenaged Indian prodigies also had an impact in other ways: there were lesser requests for him to play at cash-rich invitational tournaments. “So it did bother me in regards to my career. I wondered, is my career done? Am I hory?”
Lonely planet
It’s a lonesome pursuit, chess. Even though many players travel with family members to tournaments for emotional sustenance, these chaperones are not always fully-equipped to understand what a chess player goes through mentally over the course of a tournament.
Vaishali Rameshbabu and Vidit Gujrathi. (FIDE/Anna Shtourman)
Over the years, though, Vidit has forged a kinship with other players like Dutch GM Anish Giri, who is the same age at 29. Giri was one of the first ones to congratulate Vidit after the title. But it was the 35-year-old from USA, Hikaru Nakamura, who offered up a very succinct line about the significance of Vidit’s triumph at FIDE Grand Chess. “Amongst the Indians, Vidit is the player who is overlooked all the time because of Praggnanandhaa, Arjun Erigaisi, Gukesh and Nihal Sarin. He gets lost amongst the others so it’s nice to see him shining for once,” Nakamura told FIDE.Most Read
1
Kolkata or Mumbai, where will India play their World Cup semifinal? Depends on who they face

2
Aamir Khan charged Rs 25 lakh for a commercial, Shah Rukh Khan was ready to do it for Rs 6 lakh as he wanted to buy Mannat: Prahlad Kakkar

See More

“Ek sense of tribe hota hai na? So definitely this (happiness) must be coming subconsciously or consciously from the knowledge that the success has come to someone from my generation. You feel like one of our guys is doing well,” chuckles Vidit.

That self-doubt that had nagged him for all these years is finally relegated to a tiny corner of his mind. There are no more questions about whether his time is done. Vidit’s next big challenge before he plans his assault on the Candidates is shifting base to Mumbai to grow his chess career.
“That’s a very tough job. Possibly tougher than winning Grand Swiss,” he says, smiling.