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PHOTO: MURALI KUMAR K.

THREE CHAMPS Karnataka’s Akshay Bharadwaj, Satvik M. and Arjun Bharat have made a tremendous impact

M. Satvik is the younger son of a doctor couple from the city. He started playing chess when he was four-and-a-half years old with his brother, M. Suraj who has played competition-level chess. Suraj taught Satvik the basics and Satvik made rapid progress. He is now being coached by former State Champion Aravind Shastry.

At the age of six, Satvik was ready to participate in tournaments and played his first championship in 2002 at Sirsi. This was a selection event for youngsters to participate in the nationals and he finished eighth.

The first two ranked in the tournament played for the State. In 2004 at Sangli, Satvik played in the under-eight category and won the tournament. After that, his trophy case kept filling with good performances. In 2005, he was placed third in the under-eight, won the under-ten (where he beat Girish Koushik to win the title) and finished fifth in the under-12.

In 2006, Satvik made his first trip abroad where he participated in the Asian Youth Championship at Teheran. He bagged the bronze medal and in that tournament had the measure of Ch Mohineesh and forced a draw with the ultimate champion, Prince Bajaj from Delhi.

Satvik takes the game very seriously with practice for two hours on weekdays and four on weekends. He has become used to travelling abroad having played in Greece at the World Schools’ Championship where he was placed fifth in the individual event and won a gold along with Ivana Furtado, Sweety Patel, C.H. Meghana and Abhimanyu Puranik, the other team members of India A. He has also played at Georgia, Russia (silver in the under-eight team event in a blitz tournament), Dubai (Asian Championship 2007, 10th place) and will be participating in the World Under-10 Tournament in Turkey next month. He has the distinction of participating in three international events already this year.

Akshay Bharwadaj, a Delhi Public School student in the fourth standard, started playing only two years ago. His mother taught him the moves of the game and he started to play regularly with his father. “I used to lose to him at first but now I can beat him,” says Akshay.

To realise his potential, Akshay’s parents had him coached initially at Shree Krishna Udupa’s academy at Indiranagar, where he went twice a week. As Udupa stopped coaching, Akshay moved to N. Sanjay another former State Champion. He has now begun coaching with D.V. Prasad.

Akshay started playing in the monthly tournaments at C.V. Raman Nagar and his first success came in the Rajanna Memorial State Level Tournament where he was placed third in the under-eight section.

In March last year he won the Chess World Academy title, a local tournament in the under-eight section. He played his first national tournament at Solapur in 2006 and his first ever rating tournament at Thrissur the same year. He finished runner-up in the Ramaswamy Gounder Memorial Tournament at Karur in May 2007 and won the All India FIDE Rated Tournament at Mangalore this year. Akshay is presently the highest FIDE rated player in the under-nine section in Karnataka.

Another youngster who has displayed potential is Arjun Bharat. The eight-year-old student of Delhi Public School, North, has achieved a FIDE rating of 1,825 and is one of the three youngest in the country to do so. He started playing at the age of six and was taught by his mother. Since then he has been encouraged by his school principal, Hanumantha of the State Association and former players D.V. Prasad, Thej Kumar and Aravind Sastry.

Arjun improves his game by playing chess with a computer. He is also interested in swimming, cricket, solving mathematical problems and Su-do-ku.

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