Norway Chess’ confessional booth has a new star: Divya Deshmukh

An innovation of the Norway Chess tournament, the confessional booth is a special, sound-proof room near the playing hall that players are encouraged to walk into in the middle of their game, and without being asked by anyone, bare their unfiltered thoughts for live broadcast viewers. It’s an introverted chess player’s worst nightmare. Deshmukh, at the opposite end of the spectrum from being introverted, decides to ace it. So much so that she makes two trips to the confessional before her game against Ju on Monday has even entered the middlegame phase. As it turns out, Deshmukh is the only female player to visit the confessional booth on Monday.

Players like Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura (who was here last year) cannot get enough of the confessional booth. The Indians, on the other hand, have traditionally wanted to be nowhere near it. At last year’s edition, R Vaishali had said that the organisers had to nudge her to give the booth a try.

Deshmukh, the youngest player ever to be invited to play in the Norway Chess tournament, needs no such nudges. One of the most candid players on the circuit, the confession booth seems like it was made for a player of Deshmukh’s presence.

In the second visit to the confessional, she decides to show off her analytical nous. She explains why she hates her pawn structure on the queen-side against Ju. She speaks of why she would hate it if her opponent’s ‘bishop came out to play’. She throws up some ideas of what she could play, examines them under a microscope, and then discards them to the rubbish bin one by one as horrible ones.

After a while, she shrugs and admits: “I’m yet to find a good move. But hopefully when she plays, I’ll miraculously find one.”

It’s like having a grandmaster’s brain being examined in real-time under an X-ray.

When the time comes to find good moves over the board, she does find them, neutralizing the attack of the reigning women’s world champion in a 52-move draw before she wins the Armageddon contest with black pieces.

In Armageddon, the player with black pieces only needs a draw to be declared the winner of the contest while their opponent using white pieces has to win. So a draw would have sufficed for Deshmukh. But she won the game by getting a resignation out of Ju after a stunning hop of the knight that would have led to her pocketing Ju’s all-powerful queen.

Players like Koneru Humpy and Anna Muzychuk believe that this year’s Norway Chess Women tournament features the strongest field ever assembled in a women’s chess tournament. The pre-tournament win percentage calculations by noted game theoretician Mehmet Mars Seven gave Deshmukh bleak chances of winning the event. Mars Seven gave the Indian prodigy a 7.3 per cent chance of winning this year’s Norway Chess Women, the worst among the six female players. Her opponent in the opening round, as per the same estimate, had a 28.3 per cent chance of winning this year’s tournament, the highest chances among anyone else.

After her win over Ju, Deshmukh’s opponent on Tuesday will be Koneru Humpy, India’s first woman to become a grandmaster. The tournament will just get harder.

But expect Deshmukh to rely on the confessional as a strategy when things get hairy.

“It was very fun (going to the confessional booth). It’s a great stress relief especially after you have been playing for so many hours you cannot talk, and you have to just listen to the voices in your head,” says Deshmukh.

(The writer is in Oslo at the invitation of Norway Chess)