Para Sports
Kishan Gangolli crowned National Blind Chess Champion for 7th time
Kishan Gangolli was crowned the champion for the seventh time.
The 16th AICFB National Chess Championship for the Visually Challenged, concluded at the Rambhau Mhalgi Prabodhini Keshav Srushti, where Kishan Gangolli was crowned the champion for the seventh time.
Aryan Joshi of Maharashtra and Soundarya Pradhan of Odisha finished half a point behind Gangoli with a score of 7, followed by Ashwin Makwana and Darpan Inani with 6.5 points.
Dr Charudatta Jhadhav, President of the All India Chess Federation of the Blind (AICFB) and International Braille Chess Association (IBCA) said, “We are very proud of all the players who have strived hard and reached here to achieve recognition on a national level. After this, our next steps will include preparing the national winners for the World Championship and Asian Para Games of 2023. Along with this, we will also move forward to achieve our vision of providing technology-based infrastructure to empower the visually challenged to pursue chess and prepare themselves for all the various tournaments in the coming future. Besides this, we also wish to come up with a standard maturity model to track the performance of players and highlight improvisations.”
The top four players — Kishan Gangolli, Aryan Joshi, Soundarya Kumar Pradhan and Ashvin Makwana — will form an Indian team for the forthcoming World Individual Chess Championship that will be held in the month of October in Greece.
Besides this, twelve other players in the categories of totally blind (B1) and partially blind (B2 & B3) will be selected for the upcoming Asian Para Games that will be held in October in Hangzhou, China.
A total of 56 players (all visually challenged) were selected to take part in this prestigious tournament on the basis of their performance at the state and zonal chess tournaments conducted all over India.
