Power cut, dying laptop, flickering candle: Still Sivakasi’s 8-year-old chess whiz upsets World No 7

Sathish Arumugam, Tamizh’s father, tried to initially convince his son that he should skip the event altogether since the laptop battery wouldn’t hold and there was no guarantee when the power would return. But the chess prodigy was in no mood to relent. Before the start of the tournament, Sathish clicked a photo of his son sitting on the floor, facing a laptop with the candle in a corner. Then he tucked away his phone, hoping to conserve battery and data so that it could take the place of his wife’s phone if it gave way. Sathish thought it would be a good photo in the future when Tamizh does something big. Little did he know that his son was in the mood to blitz his way through long-term goals.

“When I took that photo, I thought it would be useful in a few years,” Sathish tells The Indian Express. “I was sure he would achieve something big in the future and then I will use this photo to motivate others by showing how once upon a time, he played even on a dark night. I didn’t think it would be useful in a few minutes.”

When he talks about his son’s exploits, Sathish cannot help but think back to his father, who, about three decades ago, went to Saudi Arabia to work as a labourer in the desert so that his sons could make something of themselves. Back in the day, with the family having no phone, the father would relay messages of his well-being from a country thousands of kilometres away using audio-recorded cassettes. These cassettes would be sent back home through anyone who was travelling to a neighbouring village, a process that could take months before the family heard his voice.

These days, news of his son’s exploits on the board ring out in the Gulf in the space of hours.

“My father couldn’t study a lot. But he did what he had to for the family. He sacrificed his life in the Gulf. My son also has not been to school in a year to pursue what he wants to,” says an emotional Sathish, who works as an officer with the Tamil Nadu government.

Sathish explains that he used the candle to light up his room — and more importantly — Tamizh’s face so that he could pass the muster on the tournament organiser Chess.com’s stringent fairplay requirements. The Freestyle Fridays tournament is an online blitz event powered by Chess.com where titled players can compete in the Chess960 variant (where pieces on the back ranks don’t start in the usual positions).

His father has plenty of tales of his son coming back from tournaments with rating gains of over 100 ELO. These gains propelled him to becoming the youngest player to cross the 2000 rating mark and become one of the youngest Candidate Masters in the world. He recently even won a Maruti Suzuki car for his performance at a tournament.

But what his son did against one of the strongest players of this generation made him hit internatinal headlines. By the 22nd move of the three-minute game, Keymer, playing with white pieces, was scrambling for his king’s life. After the queens were traded on move 31, both of Tamizh’s rooks chased Keymer’s king around. In 44 moves, the game was over as Keymer resigned.

Sathish admits that he usually doesn’t know what the calibre of his son’s opponents are. So when Tamizh announced he had defeated Keymer, his question to his son was: ‘FIDE master? Candidate Master, International Master or GM?’

Plenty of Tamizh’s early chess was played on online portals like Chess.com and Lichess. It was only just over a year back that his father wrote to Hatsun Chess Academy, a premier residential chess training center near Sivakasi, to apply for their program. Grandmaster Vishnu Prasanna, who was the man who shaped Gukesh, the youngest world champion in history, coaches at Hatsun.

Once Tamizh was accepted, the family had to make a tough call. He and his mother Uma moved to Sivakasi while Sathish and his daughter live in their native place in Kallakurichi, about 300 kilometres away from Sivakasi. The family meets over weekends, if at all.

Sathish knows all these sacrifices will be worth it. His eight-year-old son, who barged his way into the global spotlight even in the middle of a powercut, will make sure of it.