Vidit Gujrathi interview for Khelnow

Vidit Gujrathi, the Indian chess star that just got engaged, is currently playing the London Chess Classic 2024. In game 1 he made a solid draw with Mamedyarov and game 2 will see him play Andrew Hong with the white pieces.

Khelnow.com had a chance to interact with Vidit who spoke about his issue of handling time pressure and talked about changes that can make chess more spectator friendly. Here are some excerpts from the conversation.

Q) How do you handle pressure, and time during the matches? What are your plans to avoid time trouble?

Vidit Gujrathi: Yeah, it’s one of the things that I’m struggling with right now, and I haven’t figured it out yet, but clearly, I’m more aware of it now due to this current format. So, there are a couple of ways, and I’ll have to either forcefully try to play fast or change my style a bit so that it suits the faster format, but I haven’t figured it out, so I don’t know.
Q) Your career to date has been loaded with tons of ups and downs. How do you handle the emotions of a downfall after a good streak of matches and keep the motivation going?

Vidit Gujrathi: There are times when, let’s say after the candidates, I felt a loss of motivation, but in general, motivation is not much of a problem, dealing with losses or tough times is something that I’m trying to learn. I feel in the process of becoming a better chess player, I’m ending up being a better person and learning more about myself. So it’s kind of a spiritual journey for me.

Q) Any changes you would like to see in chess rules?

Vidit Gujrathi: There is a possibility to tweak, some of the rules, like if a player has more pieces but it’s a theoretical draw, he should get more than half a point. In general, I think it has to be made more spectator-friendly. That’s the biggest change which is required.
Q) You were asking about a possible app on Twitter. Your views on that?

Vidit Gujrathi: Yeah, it’s not easy to follow chess on the phone nowadays because the apps are a bit cluttered and it’s not seamless to follow all the news, see what the upcoming tournaments are, and who is playing where. It’s very basic if you think of it, but something like this doesn’t exist in the market.

See the full interview here