PANAJI: Hosts India will field a record 6 teams and 30 players including the open and women’s category, at the 44th edition of the Chess Olympiad at Mamallapuram, Chennai. Goa’s International Master Bhakti Kulkarni is part of India-1 team in the women’s section.
Each team will have 5 members out of which four will be fielded in each round. The captain of the team, in most cases non-playing, will decide the team composition. The Olympiad will be a 11 Round Swiss League event. The host countries can field two teams but India could field one additional team in both the categories as the total number of teams were odd, stated a press release.
The three Indian ‘Open’ teams are seeded 2nd, 11th and 17th respectively.
The second seeded India-1 Open team consists of Vidit Gujrathi, P.Harikrishna, Arjun Erigaisi, S.L. Narayan and Sasikaran Krishnan.
The India-2 Open team members are Nihal Sarin, D.Gukesh, B.Adhiban, R.Praggnanandhaa and Raunak Sadhwani.
The India-3 Open team comprises Surya Shekhar Ganguly, S.P. Sethuraman, Abhijeet Gupta, Karthikeyan Murali and Abhimanyu Puranik.
Incidentally, all the 15 players in the Open Teams are Grandmasters.
In the Women’s section, India-1 team is seeded first while India-2 and India-3 team are seeded 11th and 16th respectively.
The India-1 women’s team consists of Koneru Humpy, D.Harika, R.Vaishali, Tania Sachdev and Bhakti Kulkarni.
The India-2 women’s team members are Vantika Agrawal, Soumya Swaminathan, Mary Ann Gomes, Padmini Rout and Divya Deshmukh.
The India-3 women’s team comprises Eesha Karavade, Sahithi Varshini, Pratyusha Bodda, Nandhidhaa PV and Vishwa Vasnawala.
In the 2014 Chess Olympiad held at Tromso, Norway India won a bronze medal in the open category and in the 2020 virtual Olympiad, India won the joint gold medal while in the 2021 virtual Olympiad, India finished with a bronze medal.
