Chennai, July 26 (Agency) A record total of 30 Indian Players across six teams (three each in open and women) will be participating at the Chess Olympiad, starting from July 29. The three Indian open teams are seeded 2nd, 11th and 17th respectively. The second seeded India-1 Open team consists of Vidit Gujrathi, P.Harikrishna, Arjun Erigaisi, S.L. Narayan and Sasikaran Krishnan. India-2 Open team members are Nihal Sarin, D.Gukesh, B.Adhiban, R.Praggnanandhaa and Raunak Sadhwani and India-3 open team comprises Surya Shekhar Ganguly, S.P. Sethuraman, Abhijeet Gupta, Karthikeyan Murali and Abhimanyu Puranik. Incidentally, all the 15 players in the Open Team are Grandmasters. In the women’s section, India-1 team is seeded first while India-2 and India-3 team are seeded 11th and 16th respectively.
The India-1 women’s team consists of Koneru Humpy, D.Harika, R.Vaishali, Tania Sachdev and Bhakti Kulkarni. Vantika Agrawal, Soumya Swaminathan, Mary Ann Gomes, Padmini Rout and Divya Deshmukh are in India-2 women’s team members. The India-3 women’s team comprises Eesha Karavade, Sahithi Varshini, Pratyusha Bodda, Nandhidhaa PV and Vishwa Vasnawala. This is the first time ever that India is hosting the 44th edition of the Chess Olympiad at Mamallapuram, Chennai. With a record 187 countries taking part with 188 Teams in Open section and 162 in the Women’s section, the Olympiad will witness highest ever participation. In the 2014 Chess Olympiad held at Tromso, Norway India won a bronze medal in the open category and in the 2020 virtual Olympiad, India won the joint gold medal while in the 2021 virtual Olympiad, India finished with a bronze medal.