A coach who skipped lunch for five straight days, a team nicknamed the "Greek Goddess," and a nod to MS Dhoni — that is the recipe that carried a band of underdogs nobody picked to win to chess glory in Bengaluru.
When Season 4 of the Global Chess League began less than a fortnight ago, six teams took the board, and hardly anyone had Ganges Grandmasters finishing on top of anything. But by Sunday, as confetti cannons went off, it was this diverse and unexpected side — not the defending champion APL Pipers, not the team with world number one Magnus Carlsen on its top board — standing alone at the podium.
The final went down to the wire. The two sides drew the first leg 3-3, setting up a tense second leg. There, Grandmaster Ian Nepomniachtchi pounced on a positional slip from Carlsen, refusing to hand the five-time world champion any way back. As Carlsen's position collapsed, so did the Pipers' hopes. The aggregate: Ganges Grandmasters 7, APL Pipers 5.
But the story behind the trophy has almost nothing to do with chess tactics at all. It belongs to Adhiban Baskaran, a 34-year-old Grandmaster who is not, by his own admission, a full-time coach.
"I didn't have any tournaments in September, so I just wanted to be part of something great," he told reporters.
That "something great" became a maiden GCL title on his debut as a coach — a fact he still seemed slightly stunned by. What made his role special was less about openings and more about heart. After the team stumbled through a topsy-turvy start with two wins and two losses, Baskaran leaned on his humour, his superstition, and his emotional investment to lift the squad's spirit.
He started handing out nicknames. Greek player Stavroula Tsolakidou got "Greek Goddess" — prepared for one match with a file titled "Prep for the Greek Goddess!" — and the name became a chant shouted across the venue when she clinched the title-sealing win over Koneru Humpy and took home the Player of the Tournament award, complete with a Jawa motorbike.
Then came the fasting. After a mid-tournament loss, Baskaran quietly promised himself he would skip dinner if the team wasn't winning. They won, so he ate. But he decided not to fix something that wasn't broken, and turned it into a five-day ritual.
"I didn't have lunch for the past five days," he revealed, "with the thought that I would not have dinner if the team didn't win. But luckily, my team was always winning." By the end, he was only half-joking: "My stomach is literally crying now."
His calm had a surprising origin too — a text from his father during that rough patch, urging him to be like his role model, "Captain Cool" MS Dhoni. He even wears number seven on his jersey, shared by both Dhoni and Ronaldo. It's a choice that gives his dad a running inside joke that "the credit always walks back to Dhoni."
Baskaran deflects the credit entirely. "Here I feel it's because of my team." But ask the players, and they say keeping it all together was very much his doing — proof that sometimes the most powerful chess move happens off the board, in the spirit of the people playing it.