Latest news with #GrenkeFreestyleChessOpen2025
Indian Express
23-04-2025
- Sport
- Indian Express
Leon Mendonca, the Goan chess whiz known for Hawaiian shirts, attacking chess and appetite for big scalps
At the recently-concluded Grenke Freestyle Chess Open 2025, a new terror on the chess board emerged from India: 19-year-old Leon Luke Mendonca, who defeated players like Ian Nepomniachtchi and Richard Rapport and ground out draws against grandmasters like Alexey Sarana, Wesley So and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave. After the nine-round event ended on Monday in Karlsruhe, Leon was 10th in the standings out of 297 players. Of these, 31 players started the event with a better rating than the ever-smiling, bespectacled boy from Goa with a penchant for Hawaiian shirts and attacking chess. For Leon, who became India's 67th grandmaster in 2020, moments under the bright arc lights on the global stage have been limited. His rise, after all, coincided with India discovering its golden generation with stars like world champion Gukesh, Praggnanandhaa and Arjun Erigaisi. Unlike a Gukesh or a Pragg, who hail from chess-loving Chennai, Leon took his first steps in the sport in the small town of Saligao in Goa. But his rise is also testament to the fact that the sport is spreading fast in India, at outposts away from the traditional centres. Before Leon, Goa had one more grandmaster in the form of Anurag Mhamal. The Grenke Freestyle Chess Open was Leon's second big-ticket event this year. He was part of the Tata Steel chess tournament in Wijk aan Zee earlier this year with the likes of Gukesh, Praggnanandhaa and Erigaisi. But that event had not gone as per plan with him winning just one game and finishing 13th out of 14 players. The event in Grenke, though, saw him play some of his best chess and that too in the freestyle variant, which most elite players agree feels like a completely different sport than regular chess. 'It's my first time playing a freestyle chess tournament. This freestyle variant is the best thing. I hope this is the future of chess. It kind of forces players to focus on their own skills rather than memorizing opening theory,' Leon told the tournament's YouTube handle right after beating Nepomniachtchi. Just to get a measure of how good Leon was at the Grenke Chess tournament, Nepomniachtchi held an advantage of 114 rating points on the Indian and was yet forced to resign in 36 moves in round 3. In the next round, Richard Rapport (rated 79 rating points ahead of Leon) was handed defeat in 35 moves. In his nine games, he lost just once to end as the second best placed Indian at Grenke, behind Erigaisi. Leon's first motivation to play the sport has echoes of Magnus Carlsen: they both wanted to beat their elder sisters on the battlefield of 64 squares. 'His sister Beverly was first given a chess set as a gift, that's when we sent her to a class to get coaching. She would then teach Leon, who was just around four or five at that time, what she had learnt at the class that day. That's how he started,' father Lyndon told The Indian Express. Even as his sister soon moved on to other pursuits, the boy was so enamoured by the sport that he would often play against himself at home. Back when he started to become good at the sport, Leon's biggest challenge was getting top-quality coaching in Goa, said Lyndon. So father and son became journeymen, chasing elite chess knowledge around the country. They lived with Akash Thakur in Nagpur for a while, where his basics were strengthened. With online chess coaching still not a thing back in those days, there were also other stints with Rajesh Bahadur in Madhya Pradesh and Shashikant Kutwal in Pune. 'Because at some point, we realized that we had to move on (from Goa). So, we started going to neighboring states like Maharashtra, Karnataka and then Tamil Nadu,' said Lyndon. Around 2015, when Leon started to show serious potential, they approached grandmaster RB Ramesh to be his coach. Ramesh has shaped the careers of many elite players like Praggnanandhaa, Vaishali and Aravindh Chitambaram. But it meant plenty of days spent in Chennai to learn at one of the country's premier finishing institutes in chess: Ramesh's Chess Gurukul. Currently, Leon is being mentored by Vishnu Prasanna, the man who shaped the career of Gukesh, who last year became the world's youngest world champion in chess history. Leon also benefitted from being part of the first cohort of students at the Westbridge Anand Chess Academy, started by five-time world champion Viswanathan Anand. Lyndon said that what makes his son unique is that he never really complains about anything: no fuss about hotel rooms, no hissy fit over hectic travel itineraries, no rants about arbiters or tournament organisers. To illustrate this, he gives the example of the time both of them were stranded in Budapest for many months when the world shut down abruptly due to the coronavirus pandemic. Instead of going stir-crazy at being caught in a foreign land in one of the most uncertain times in living memory, Leon, accompanied by his father, chased his goals on the chess board, claiming the three norms that one needs to become a grandmaster during the pandemic in the chess-revering cities. 'Raising Leon has always been a pleasure for me because he is very dedicated to whatever he does. He has come up the hard way. But with him, there are never any complaints. So, we never had issues even in those uncertain times, be it food or accommodation,' said Lyndon who said that Leon even joined a church choir in Budapest with a second-hand violin that he had arranged for in exchange for giving the previous owner chess lessons.
Indian Express
22-04-2025
- Sport
- Indian Express
Meet Leon Luke Mendonca, the bespectacled smiling assassin of the 64 squares who plays violin
In just 14 moves, Ian Nepomniachtchi was reduced to frowning at his pieces like they were refusing to obey his commands. Things had curdled pretty fast for the Russian on the board in round 3 of the Grenke Freestyle Chess Open 2025. A few moves later, Nepo was pushed past the point of no return. On move 36, he resigned. Against a player who had over 100 rating points less than him. In the next round, it was Hungarian grandmaster Richard Rapport's turn to endure punishment, and then heartbreak in the form of defeat. The player who had made two of the world's top chess players roll over in back-to-back games was a 19-year-old grandmaster from India. Not one of the usual suspects of Gukesh, Praggnanandhaa and Arjun Erigaisi. The boy making heads turn at the Grenke Freestyle event over nine rounds was Leon Luke Mendonca, who is contemporary of the Gukesh-Praggnanandhaa-Arjun Erigaisi vintage, and was playing in his first event in freestyle chess — a variant of the sport that has been called by many practitioners as a completely different sport than plan ol' regular chess. With Leon's rating at 2643, six of the nine players he faced in Karlsruhe were rated higher than him. Despite that, in those six games against higher-rated rivals, Leon had two wins over Nepo and Rapport besides three draws against elite grandmasters like Alexey Sarana, Wesley So and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave. At an event where he was 32nd in terms of ratings, he ended 10th in the final standings. For the Goan prodigy, Karlsruhe has been a breakthrough event. The kind that makes the world sit up and take notice. He could have had this moment earlier this year: at the Tata Steel Masters in Wijk aan Zee; he had Vincent Keymer on the mat in the first round before a single blunder saw him lose. Shaken by that loss, Leon never recovered, ending 13th out of 14 players at Tata Steel with just one win. But at Grenke Chess, the bespectacled boy with a constant smile on his face and a steady supply of Hawaiian shirts that would impress even Hikaru Nakamura, has enjoyed himself. 'This variant is the best thing. I hope this is the future of chess. It kind of forces players to focus on their own skills rather than memorizing opening theory,' said Leon to the tournament's YouTube handle right after beating Nepo. 'It's my first time playing a freestyle chess tournament. I signed up immediately without any hesitation when I found out that there was an open tournament.' The making of Mendonca Many chess players who succeed have a one-dimensional approach to life: chess, and not much else. Not Leon though, who plays the violin so well that he joined the choir of a church in Budapest for a few months when he and his father, Lyndon, were stranded there as the world abruptly shut down due to the coronavirus pandemic in early 2020. 'Leon would play the violin and I'd play the guitar in the choir. Even though we were in Budapest for over a year during the pandemic, it was not that we really missed home. We were all alone initially, but we made friends who made us feel at home. Budapest became a second home for us,' Lyndon told The Indian Express earlier this year. One of those friends included a French boy who played basketball with Leon every day ('Leon needs an hour of sweat,' said Lyndon). Another 'friend' was chess legend Judit Polgar. Lyndon says that Leon is the kind of boy who never complains about anything. The father is a bit of the same. During the conversation he casually mentioned how Leon has had no sponsors for a while, but immediately dismissed it as not an issue with a casual, 'My wife and I put in all our savings. We chose this path because we always believed in letting our kids do what they love to do. We didn't have these choices in our time.' Even while things were tough for both of them living abroad on a shoestring budget during the pandemic, not once did Leon grumble. Instead, he found other avenues to liven up the slow and dull COVID life. Like the violin. And basketball. Having left Leon's regular violin back in India, Lyndon tracked down someone who was selling their old violin on the internet, and Leon ended up giving the boy a few chess lessons in exchange for his violin. When Leon became a grandmaster in late 2020, Lyndon received a text message from Viswanathan Anand asking if his son would be open to getting chess lessons from him at his new academy, WACA. 'For me, that invitation was like when you go through a struggle, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. So, for me, this was light. This was like the greatest reward I could ever receive for all the sacrifices that we did: Anand himself inviting him to join his academy,' said Lyndon.
