When it comes to making the right moves over the board of 64 squares, none could match the consistency of the prodigious Parimarjan Negi in the past decade.
After nine years as a Grandmaster, the second youngest in the game’s all-time list, the 22-year-old has decided to move on. Having spearheaded India to a historic first medal in the recent Chess Olympiad in Tromso, Norway, Negi is now headed to Stanford University for a four-year under-graduate course. And chess has nothing to do with the youngster getting the nod in one of the premier educational institutes in the world.
For the academically brilliant Negi, Stanford offered a “generous financial aid” to meet the annual expenses of $70,000.
In order to ensure that his salaried parents were not financially burdened to meet even part of his education-expenses, he chose a novel way.
He penned a book and became India’s youngest chess author at 22!
“It is a five-book series on opening theories. Most top players would not like to do (such a book) it because it means you are giving away your analysis. I’m really not keeping things back. My idea behind writing this book was to partly fund my education or help with that. I will not be playing as much as I used to. In a way, my ideas and analysis are less useful for me now.
“It was not something I would be doing if I was playing ambitiously. I will continue to play chess but not aiming to be among the elite.”
The first part of the series under Grandmaster Repertoire is titled, “1. e4 vs The French, Caro-kann & Philidor” and was released earlier this month. He is already close to putting the finishing touches to the book on Sicilian Najdorf.
Though chess is not part of Stanford University, Negi noted, “They have a system that takes into count everything and chess is very useful as a talking point in your essays and your life experiences, and if you can present it in a good, clear way, it is a big asset.”
Touching upon the drawn game against World No. 2 Levon Aronian, Negi said, “In a non-team event, I would have probably played him like just another guy and tried to beat him because that would have been a much better learning experience. I tried for an advantage and did not take an early draw.”
