NEW DELHI: Indian grandmaster Nihal Sarin didn’t need more than three words to shut down a troll on X. After India’s open team wrapped up their campaign at the 46th Chess Olympiad in Samarkand with a silver medal, Nihal posted a simple message of celebration, penning, “Happy to win silver for Team India. Congratulations to Uzbekistan.”It should have been an uncontroversial post. Instead, it drew an ugly reply from one user. “Plz quit playing for India. Play for Pakistan,” the comment read, which has now been deleted.Nihal didn’t let it slide, nor did he engage at length. His response was just as brief as the provocation. The Kerala-born grandmaster wrote, “on board 0?”At Chess Olympiad, players are assigned to boards 1 through 4 based on rating/strength within the squad, with Board 1 being the strongest player. As for example, Nihal was on Board 3 for India at this Chess Olympiad. There’s no such thing as “Board 0”. Nihal’s “on board 0?” was a sarcastic, understated way of turning the jab on its head. The implication was that if he were playing for Pakistan, he, currently rated 2718, would be so far ahead of the team’s existing board order that even Board 1 would not be enough, hence the tongue-in-cheek invention of “Board 0”.Rather than engage with the provocation, Nihal dismissed it in three words.
A mixed personal campaign
The exchange came at the end of a tournament that had its own share of ups and downs for the 22-year-old chess star individually.He started in fine form, winning his first three games, against Thailand, Indonesia and Italy, before the results cooled off with back-to-back draws against Spain and the Netherlands.Round 6, against hosts Uzbekistan, proved to be the turning point. Nihal blundered his queen in a winning position against Nodirbek Yakubboev, a loss that visibly rattled him, he lost again the very next round, in a marathon 88-move battle against England’s Luke McShane.Those two defeats were the only blemishes on an otherwise solid campaign; Nihal steadied himself in the rounds that followed, drawing against Germany’s Frederik Svane, beating Uzbekistan second team’s Mukhammadzokhid Suyarov in Round 10, and closing out the tournament with a draw against Hungary’s Benjamin Gledura.The individual numbers, though, were always going to matter less than the team result. India’s open side secured silver behind hosts Uzbekistan.