“The ‘children’ of Vishy Anand are on the loose!” was what the legendary Garry Kasparov remarked on social media platform X after 17-year-old Gukesh became the youngest player to win The Candidates Chess tournament. Gukesh who broke the 40-year-old record of the 61-year-old Kasparov is one of the students from the first batch of WestBridge Anand Chess Academy started by India’s first grandmaster Vishwanathan Anand.
India has come a long way from 1987 when Vishy bagged the title. Today the country boasts of 84 grand masters.
Ironically, while young chess prodigies seem to be flourishing in the country, the technology around the sport has not picked up much. Bengaluru-based start-up CircleChess founded by chess parents Kumar Gaurav and Swati Agarwal is trying to bridge this gap.
Easy to learn, difficult to master
Kumar Gaurav, co-founder of CircleChess, is the father of two teenagers who are active chess players. Noticing the lack of technology in the ecosystem, he sensed an opportunity to build a technology product for the larger chess community.
But that wasn’t the only reason he co-founded the start-up with Swati Agarwal.
“The second trigger was that my sons were not able to improve with usual methods of learning chess,” Gaurav recollects.
“I had switched quite a few coaches back then. Eventually, I realised that chess is a sport that is easy to learn, but difficult to master. So, I started thinking about chess technology and whether I could build something which would help my children.”
A techie, two-time founder, and previously the CTO at WakeFit, Gaurav set on to build a product that could help to not only learn chess, but also improve one’s chess skills. This was the first version of CircleChess built on a reward-base framework.
“I built a tool which could be used by the kids every day. After they play games on chess.com, they can analyse the game and solve the mistakes using the tool. If they solve all the mistakes they would get points,” Gaurav explains.
The thought process was that if a player progressed by consistently correcting the mistakes they made, they would be able to improve. Given that the majority of chess players in India are kids, Gaurav, who himself is an internationally rated chess player, felt an incentivisation framework may work better. And it did.
His sons who religiously used the tool improved 400-500 rating points on Chess.com in about 4-5 months.
Expanding the scope
The next step was to address the problems of offline professional chess players.
Within the larger chess community, discovery was a major pain point. Players faced challenges in finding a tournament, understanding which tournament one could play, and registering for the same. Gaurav and his team therefore built a whatsApp bot as a one-stop solution for seamlessly facilitating activities of chess players.
“If you are playing a tournament, there may be 6-7 rounds. After each, the player must constantly refresh the website to see if the results have been declared. We built a tool which would send them notifications on WhatsApp as soon as something was published,” Gaurav says.
“Registration was another problem. How do I discover a tournament, in which part of the city it is happening, what is the type of event, what are the dates and timelines like - all these were not easy to spot. People had to check multiple websites.”
“So, we extended the bot from just having a pairing notification feature to tournament discovery and registration. It allows people to register within 10 seconds.”
Over the course, more features such as finding a coach, finding someone to practice with, and so on were added to the WhatsApp Assistant. According to the team, its user base has organically grown to around 30,000 people in the last seven months and more than 100 users are being acquired every day.
The start-up which also built a tournament management SaaS for event organisers has tied up with the Delhi Chess Association as the latter’s official technology partner.
Both the products - the WhatsApp assistant as well as the tournament management product - are available free of cost.
Building an AI chess coach
While the WhatsApp Assistant and the SaaS product have been built for the community, the core of CircleChess is an AI personalised chess coach named Caissa.
“The AI model links all your chess accounts on different platforms and brings all your games to a single point. It would then do a detailed analysis of all your games and spot your strengths and weaknesses. Based on this, personalised goals and training plan would be set for the player,” Gaurav explains.
A platform to track the progress of the player has also been built into this and parental controls have been integrated.
“In chess, there is no standard assessment framework that exists as of now. We have built a one-of-a-kind assessment engine as part of Caissa. It is useful to all levels of players - whether you want to use it for assessment, learning, content, everything,” claims Gaurav.
Breaking the monopoly
Tarun Mittal, founding member at CircleChess, points out that technology in online chess has been more or less dominated by U.S.-based Chess.com leading to monopoly and lack of innovation. Offline chess tournaments on the other hand are still being managed by technology built in the early 2000s which leaves a lot of gaps, he notes.
“There is no chess learning platform in the market today that guarantees improvement. That’s what Caissa does,” Mittal says, also noting that the model has been built with inputs from coaches of leading players like Praggnananda, Gukesh and Arjun.
Aiding coaches
Vishnu Prasanna, Grandmaster in 2013 and coach of Gukesh, is the chief chess officer at CircleChess. He feels Caissa could be a solution to one of the major problems in the Indian chess ecosystem - that is too many players and too few coaches.
“As a coach, you cannot be everywhere. The ratio of coaches to students is low in India. Caissa would help the coaches arrive at certain conclusions much faster and help the students accordingly. This solves a lot of problems for coaches, and they can work with a greater number of students this way than they could manually,” Prasanna says.
Talking from experience, he notes that whether a student lands the right coach or not is a hit or miss often. This has the potential to build or destroy careers. According to him, CircleChess’s community initiatives help to solve this by giving players as well as coaches more exposure. Yet another aspect is the high-level insights Caissa provides at a very small price, he notes.
Group coaching in India varies between ₹300-1000 per person per class. Private lessons could be between ₹800-5000. CircleChess team is trying to bring it down to about 1/5th of the existing fees, and monthly subscription plans would be made available for ₹300-700, says Gaurav.
Caissa, which is currently in its beta phase, is getting ready for a global launch in July.
