It was the winter of 2016, Christmas time in Canada with snow all over
the place and temperatures getting super cold. As Deepa had taught Sarthak to show 110 countries and
flags when he was just 2 years old, she was very confident about him learning chess. She was already pestering me to take
interest and start teaching chess to Sarthak. We could not go outside
much due to weather conditions and had holidays, so I started playing chess
with him. We were amazed by his grasping ability and he was able to pick all
the rules very quickly. Initially we taught him only 2 types of
checkmates.
After doing some net surfing we realized that there is chess tournament
every month in Kitchener and we got bold and decided to take Sarthak there. He
was 4 and half years old and could draw 2 matches out of 5 against much older
opponents. He was too small and had to stand up on the chair to move pieces at
the far end. The president of the Kitchener chess board Patrick and Eva
encouraged him and gave a medal for being the youngest participant. This was a
turning point for us and we realized that we should put more efforts on
Sarthaks chess.
Being an ardent fan of people like Sachin and
Dravid who were technically very sound in their game; we wanted our kids to stick
to the basics and learn the technique of whichever game they played rather than
using haphazard methods to succeed. So we approached Andrew Peredun Sir, the
coach of Canadian National youth team and requested him to take Sarthak in his
coaching classes. He did not show much interest initially and felt that Sarthak
was too young to learn chess. Then we came across a youtube video of
Viswanathan Anand and got to learn about the opening concepts of the chess.
Sarthaks game drastically improved after teaching these basic techniques learnt
from Anand’s video.
We took him to Breslau for Waterloo region interschool
tournament. Sarthak was in junior kindergarten and was participating in the
first grade students group. At that time, we told Andrew sir to observe his
games in the tournament and see if he can be taken in for coaching. Sarthak
played brilliantly and stood second in the first grade section and won hearts
of all the participants. He got a silver medal from Andrew Sir himself.
http://www.oycc.ca/wrcc/17results.htm
We were motivated by Kitchener Waterloo Chess club to take Sarthak to
the Ontario provincials to Mississauga and his coaching classes started with
Andrew Sir. Andrew was very impressed by Sarthaks level of commitment and he
offered some free teaching classes to him. KW chess president Patrick Sir told
us that Sarthaks chess game is really good. Sarthak use to travel by bus in
very cold weather and attend the class after a long tiring day at school. The
class had some fun staff like after solving some set of puzzles and after
attending every class; some chester points were given to each student. After
collecting 400-500 points usually kids use to buy cookies or toys by trading
their chester points. However, Sarthak wanted a chess set and he earned and
accumulated 10000 points by solving 100 pages’ puzzle book to earn it. Till
date he is using the same chess set and has not lost a single piece out of it.
We use to invite our neighbors and Infosys friends to play practice matches
against Sarthak. Many a times Ameya, Mazhar, Avinash, Jitu, Harsh had to pretend as if
they were losing the match to encourage Sarthak. Eventually Sarthak started
growing stronger and stronger and some of these guys started really losing
matches against him.
In the Ontario provincials Sarthak was again the youngest player in the
entire tournament and his section too. He played the best match of his life till
date by competing with top seed for more than an hour. During this one hour
match the arbiters, organizer came out twice and told us that Sarthak and his
opponent are playing a very impressive, intense tight match inside. His
expressions after coming out were priceless and I still remember his words
“Baba mi jinklo” aka “Papa I won”. After completing 5 games; 3 kids were tied
for first place and Sarthak lost in the tiebreak and eventually stood third as
he had no idea of the time control and forgot to press the clock in the blitz
tiebreak game. We were all excited after he got a big trophy at provincial level. The KW chess club had requested us for Sarthaks photographs to display them in Kitchener Art Gallery sports section.
By this time, we had decided to move back to India. We moved back carrying
these precious memories and tons of confidence on Sarthak’s chess skills.
