A thrilling online match between DBCA and KCA ends in 8-8 draw

by Sagar Shah - 04/05/2018

Students in any academy are often bored playing repeatedly against each other! So we thought why not make them compete against students of another academy! In the first of its kind match two of India's biggest and finest chess academies were pitted against each other in a unique exhibition online match. Dibyendu Barua Chess Academy from Kolkata and Kunte's Chess Academy from Pune. It was held on the Playchess server and the time control was 45 minutes + 10 seconds increment. The match was keenly contested and it ended in a thrilling 8.0-8.0 draw. We have a lot of videos, pictures, games and analysis from this online match.

The students were excited and so were the coaches! It was going to be a very unique match between two of the most popular academies in India - Dibyendu Barua Chess Academy (DBCA) and Kunte's Chess Academy (KCA). It was an online exhibition match of 16 players on each side. Both the academies have nearly 300 students enrolled with them. So it made sense to have different rating groups. Hence we made four rating groups - unrated, 1000-1400, 1400 to 1800, 1800 to 2200. In each of these four categories there were four boards. The time control was 45 minutes + 10 seconds increment per move. There were no fees collected, but all the students had to have the premium subscription of ChessBase/Playchess account. Only then would they be allowed inside the "Premium Tournaments" hall on the Playchess server. The idea was not just to have fun, but to also play a serious game that would help the student improve.

DBCA made the perfect arrangement to have all kids come to the academy and play the game. The upside was a feeling of camaraderie and team spirit. The downside was that the internet bandwidth was split between all the players | Photo: Shahid Ahmed

KCA had a few students playing from the Academy while most of them played from home | Photo: Rohit Tembe

1800 - 2200 category:

DBCA 1.0 - KCA 3.0

Arpita Mukherjee	chessdreamer2001	2151	Aditya Samant	adityass	2167	1-0
Souhardo Basak	souhardo	1831	Pruthu Deshpande	GR8KNIGHT2001	2072	0-1
Sumit Kumar	themariners	2183	Himanshu Chhabra	chhabrachess	1797	0-1
Sayan Bose	bosesayan28	1978	Rohan Joshi	rbj77	1786	0-1

This was the category where KCA was highly dominant. Apart from the top board where Arpita won against Aditya Samant, on rest of the boards KCA managed to outplay their opponents. Himanshu Chhabra was rated nearly 400 points lower than his opponent played a beautiful game to beat Sumit Kumar.

Surely showing play much higher than what his rating suggests - Himanshu Chhabra | Photo: Himanshu's Facebook page

While the match was in progress, I decided to do some live commentary on the ChessBase India Youtube channel where I discussed the game between Himanshu and Sumit and a few others in some depth:

Because of some technical issues, the game between Arpita Mukherjee and Aditya Samant had to be cut short to 20 minutes + 10 seconds increment | Photo: Shahid Ahmed

Final moments of Arpita against Aditya was captured on the camera by Shahid Ahmed

Sayan Bose had a nice position out of the opening with black against Rohan Joshi, but later blundered an entire rook and lost the game.

Pruthu Deshpande won his game against DBCA's young talent Souhardo Basak. Pruthu got the advantage in the opening and didn't let it go

Souhardo's ...b6 was a weak move. White got Qe2 and later pushed forward with e5 when Black was struggling big time

Although Souhardo's loss was primarily in the opening, the good part is that he can now analyze the game, learn from it and get ready in a real tournament game where Elo is at stake. I think this is the biggest advantage of the playing serious games online. You can afford to make mistakes, learn, improve and not make those same errors in tournament games!

1400 to 1800 - DBCA 3.0 vs KCA 1.0:

White 1800 to 2200 was dominated by KCA, the next rating group 1400-1800 was dominated by DBCA.

Sanchit Mukherjee	sanchit	1444	Arnav Nanal	ATTACK_MASTER	1357	0-1
Shounak Mazumder	riju123	1688	Akshay Borgaonkar	chess2009	1456	1-0
Dhritabrata Kundu	babua123	1510	Atharva Gavade	AtharvGavade23	1536	1-0
Aniruddh Chatterjee	omaniruddh	1525	Sankalp Kukreja	skukreja2	1463	1-0

Aniruddh Chatterjee played a fine game to beat Sankalp Kukreja:

Things looked dangerous for Arnav Nanal in the Dragon, but he kept his cool and converted the point in the endgame:

1000 to 1400 - DBCA 1.5 vs KCA 2.5

Sneha Halder	sneha123	1177	Vihaan Dawda	vihaandawda	1093	0-1
Srijak Sengupta	sansengu	1090	Shreyas Purkar	shreyasp	1223	draw
Sambuddha Roy Chowdhury	sambuddha	1106	Aditya Prabhu	ASP_2007	1285	0-1
Antik Kumar	antik2018	1076	Dhruv Haldankar	Haldankardhruv	1224	1-0

In the 1000 to 1400 section it was DBCA who won the match with a score of 2.5-1.5.

Unrated - DBCA 2.5 vs KCA 1.5

Arihant Jain	ArihantJain_2004	Anay Uplenchwar	DIEGOANAY	1-0
Satadru Ash	satadru30082009	Arjun Raje	Arjun raje	bye 1-0
Sohom Koner	soham04112006	Arnav Koparde	arnavkop	0-1
Harshit Bahety	bahety	Nikhil Chitale	Nikhilchitale	draw

Although this was the unrated section, the match was decided by the top board clash between Arihant Jain and Anay Uplenchwar. The scores were tied at 1.5 each and KCA was leading the match 8-7. At the same time Anay (KCA) was clearly moving towards victory. But a blank spot led to a huge blunder and he missed a mate in one.

Anay's last move f4-f5, meant that he had blundered a mate in one!

Final standings:

Section	DBCA	KCA
1800 - 2200	1	3
1400 - 1800	3	1
1000-1400	1.5	2.5
Unrated	2.5	1.5
Final score	8	8

8.0-8.0 was the final score!

It was a keenly contested encounter that came to a close with a 8:8 result. Both the sides went back home with a smile on their face and a lot of lessons learnt. We spoke to the founders of both DBCA and KCA academy about this match and they were thrilled with the concept. Usually you have limited number of students in the academy and the players are bored playing with each other. However, with this inter academy match on Playchess, a boy sitting in Pune could fight it out against a big talent in Kolkata! It just opens up new horizons and gives the students in academies serious playing partners.

The coaches were more excited than the players - Abhijit Kunte, co-founder of KCA

Founders of DBCA Dibyendu Barua and Saheli Dhar Barua love the concept and are keen for such matches to take place again!

It was truly a great organizational feat by DBCA to have all the students under one roof | Photo: Shahid Ahmed

For a match of this magnitude to take place smoothly a lot of things have to fall in place. Our tournament director Halsagar Chincholimath did a fine job as he ensured that all the games were played and match was smoothly conducted.

Halsagar Chincholimath's job has quite a bit of pressure where he has to manage everything at the spur of the moment, but he is now a veteran in organizing online events! | Photo: Amruta Mokal

The co-ordinators did a great job at instructing all the players of their academy on what are the things that they need to take care of - Rohit Tembe of KCA and Shahid Ahmed of DBCA.

Would you like your academy to play a match against another academy? Write to us in the comments section below. Also now would be a good time to download our free playchess windows client and also make a free account (If you are not already a member!) and start playing to get the feel of one of the most professional chess playing online servers.