NEW DELHI: It was the final round of the Global Chess League (GCL) round-robin last Saturday in Bengaluru, and American Gambits needed a big win, with an eight-point margin, to reach the final. Mumba Masters were the opponents. As the match wore on, the Gambits, playing with Black, went all out. Javokhir Sindarov, playing on the Icon board, won his game. On the next board, Indian grandmaster Nihal Sarin had an early advantage, which translated almost into a winning position. But then, calamity struck.The clock ran out. Sarin lost on time. His team lost with him.The next moment, Nihal was pressed against the side glass of the dugout, face to the panel, looking as though the gates might open and the tears might come at any second. Then he felt a palm settle lightly on his shoulder. It was none other than the Gambits’ captain and coach, Srinath Narayanan.“It was very painful,” Srinath told TimesofIndia.com later during an exclusive interaction. “You usually need some time and space for the emotions to dial down. And I think that’s pretty much the only thing that can heal things.”
Srinath with Nihal Sarin
There was no tactical debrief that night, no post-mortem of the time scramble. Srinath took the squad out for a team dinner instead. Later, back at the hotel, they pulled out board games, like Salem and Avalon, and played into the night.“We tried to take our minds off these things,” Srinath recalled with a smile. “And then at night, we played some fun games that helped us cope with it.”The response the next day suggested it had worked. Facing the same Mumba Masters in the third-place match, the Gambits crushed them across both legs. Nihal won both his games. The Gambits took bronze.
Srinath was there; he is here too
“We are overall quite happy, because it would have been very depressing and disappointing if we had lost today,” Srinath said, acknowledging his team’s performance in GCL 2026. “But it also feels like a slight underachievement given the potential of the team.”“We felt like we were definitely one of the contenders for winning the tournament. And we played that way for the most part. So we just lost out on those last two matches, where things got decided at the very end, in the last few seconds.”This is a man who knows what winning a team event actually looks like and what it takes to do so. When India took gold in Budapest at the 2024 Olympiad, Srinath was there.He was there, too, on Tuesday, when the Indian contingent landed in Samarkand for the 46th Olympiad and found themselves stranded without accommodation. And he was the first to break the silence publicly.“Having a terrible experience at the FIDE 2026 Olympiad,” he wrote on X. “The team landed 5 hours ago at Samarkand airport. The team still haven’t been allotted rooms, with absolutely no clarity on when it’ll be allotted.”As TimesofIndia.com reported later in the evening, the players were eventually given individual rooms. The coaching staff were put into shared rooms for the time being.When the suspense over India’s board order finally lifted, the team going with a straight rating-wise arrangement, putting Praggnanandhaa (2761) on Board 1, Arjun Erigaisi (2759) on Board 2, Nihal (2718) on Board 3, D Gukesh (2703) on Board 4 and Vidit Gujrathi (2697) on Board 5, Srinath took to X again, this time with rather more mischief.“Don’t blame me for keeping the board order in suspense. I had it on chess-results right from September 1,” he penned.
The captain on India’s Olympiad prep
Preparation for the Olympiad had already begun well before the GCL gig, in the form of a virtual camp with the full squad.When asked how it went, he replied, “It went really well. As a unit, we gelled really well. The players are all around similar ages. And we have Vidit, who is quite experienced but still not quite that old.”One of the sources of encouragement for the 32-year-old Grandmaster was that three of his Olympiad squad, Nihal, Arjun and Vidit, had all been in Bengaluru, and all three finished with positive scores in the tournament.
All eyes will be on Gukesh (FIDE Photo)
“It’s pretty encouraging that the three players who are here played quite well,” Srinath told this website. “All of them with positive scores. I think that’s also an encouraging sign for the team.“In general, the fact that we can all be friends with each other, we can have a fun time even outside of the tournament, I think that’s a really special thing about Olympiad.”
From rapid back to classical
There is one obvious wrinkle in going straight from a rapid-format league into the sport’s biggest classical team event. And Srinath doesn’t dismiss it.“It definitely can take a game or two to get back,” he admitted. “But it won’t take longer than that.“In general, at the Olympiad, the first few rounds are not the most challenging rounds. So it gives us plenty of time to acclimatise.”And the composition of his squad helps more.“The younger you are, the easier it is to adapt,” he said, a useful trait in a team where four of the five boards are occupied by players in their early twenties or younger.ALSO READ: The silver medal Koneru Humpy’s 9-year-old daughter will remember as goldSrinath has spent this fortnight uplifting a devastated dressing room, calling out a governing body over a logistical mess, and cheekily reminding everyone on social media that he’d had India’s board order published for weeks.In Samarkand, this is the man India counts on to do all of it again.
