Stronger and surer after Olympiad gold, Vantika devotes herself to the 64 squares Premium

Maternal pride drives Vantika Agrawal's chess success, aiming to become a Grandmaster despite financial challenges.

Maternal pride is writ large on Sangeeta Agrawal’s face as she speaks about how she prepared her daughter for the Chess Olympiad. “I made her play in 28 tournaments,” she says from the players’ lounge of the Tata Steel Chess India tournament at Kolkata. 

Her daughter, Vantika Agrawal, doesn’t have a sponsor, so that meant spending an awful lot of money. It proved money well spent.

Not only did Vantika play a starring role in the Indian women’s triumph at the Olympiad in Budapest in September, she also won the individual gold on the fourth board. When India’s players on the top two boards, D. Harika and R. Vaishali, struggled a bit, it was the consistently superb efforts by Vantika and Divya Deshmukh that helped the women win the team gold, as they replicated the great victory by the men’s team.

The Olympiad could very well prove a turning point in Vantika’s career. She is not just a stronger player, she is a more confident player. She is spending a lot more time on chess, not having to spend her energy on academics any longer. And she is also getting better as a multi-format player. That was evident earlier this month at Kolkata, where she finished third in the rapid section and fourth in the blitz (she had tied for third but had an inferior tie-break score).

She had begun as the 10th seed in a field of 10 in both sections, and did better than all the other Indian women — Koneru Humpy, Harika, Divya and Vaishali. She proved herself in a field that contained players such as three-time World blitz champion Kateryna Lagno, Alexandra Kosteniuk, Valentina Gunina and Aleksandra Goryachkina.

Vantika isn’t entirely happy with her showing, though. “It would have been nice if I could have finished third in the blitz too,” says the 22-year-old from Noida. “I lost some games that I had winning positions in, otherwise I could have done much better.”

She couldn’t have hoped to do a lot better at the Olympiad, though. Yes, there was a crucial game in which she snatched a draw from the jaws of victory, and that made her feel terrible.