Thailand silver teaches chess teen how to finish first

Calcutta:

If Bristy Mukherjee misses her 8.45pm train from Howrah after training at a Minto Park academy, she has to wait another 90 minutes to catch the next one and reach home past midnight.

The 14-year-old from Memari in East Burdwan has become used to the consequence of missing trains, but is having a hard time consoling herself about the gold medal she narrowly missed in Thailand this month.

Half a point was all that forced Bristy to settle for silver in the under-14 girls’ category of the Asian Youth Chess Championship at Chiang Mai between April 1 and 10.

Bristy had outplayed higher-ranked players in four consecutive rounds, but drew her last match against China’s Wan Quian to score 6.5 points in nine rounds. This was just half a point less than what Kazakhstan’s Kamalidenova Meruert had totalled to win the gold.

The visit to Thailand was the first time Bristy had travelled abroad. She has had to skip a couple of other international tournaments because her parents could not afford the expenditure.

Bristy’s mother had mortgaged her jewellery to arrange just over Rs 70,000 so that she could compete in the Asian Youth Chess Championship. Her father used to run a grocery shop that shut down two years ago because accompanying his daughter to tournaments left him with little time for business.

“I have to travel with Bristy within and outside the state. There is nobody else to sit at the shop,” Debasish Mukherjee told Metro at a Maidan club where Bristy and other players from Bengal were felicitated by the state chess association.

Mukherjee rents out a portion of his ancestral two-storey house for private ceremonies. The prize money that Bristy wins is kept aside to cover travel costs, although that is hardly enough.

Bristy trains at the Alekhine Chess Club at Gorky Sadan, near Minto Park, and spends six hours a day travelling. “The journey is especially taxing during the summer months,” she said.

Chess became Bristy’s life in 2010 when she was visiting a nursing home near Minto Park with her parents. “I noticed an advertisement for admission to Alekhine Chess Club. Nobody in our family was associated with chess but I liked the game,” she recalled.

That was July. In October the same year, Bristy won the first tournament she participated in – at the Khudiram Anushilan Kendra in the under-6 category. At the Asian School Championship in 2011, she won a bronze medal in the under-7 event.

Bristy, who studies at Memari Rasiklal Smriti Balika Vidyalaya, idolises Grandmaster Koneru Humpy and aspires to win laurels for the country. “She is from a place where there is hardly any chess infrastructure. She is promising but the pressure to perform sometimes hampers her game. Her performance in Thailand is encouraging. This is the break she needed,” said Atanu Lahiri, the general secretary of the Bengal Chess Association.

source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph,Calcutta,India / Home> Calcutta / by Debraj Mitra / April 15th, 2018