• Suneetha Wijesuriya on her chess journey that began in 1979

In 1979, chess was a relatively unknown game in Sri Lanka, popular only amongst the wealthy living in cities like Colombo and Kandy. When a then-17-year-old Suneetha Wijesuriya, an A/Level student at Kotikawatta Rajasinghe Maha Vidyalaya, was introduced to the game by her English teacher, she fell in love right away.

“I was drawn into the game because I found the chess pieces interesting, and once I started playing, I found the objective of safeguarding our king while checkmating the opponent’s king fascinating,” she told The Daily Morning Brunch, sitting down for a chat at the Anatoly Karpov Chess Club in the Russian House in Colombo.

Having never even seen a chess board up till then, she went home and taught the game to her brother and sister. “We didn’t have a chess board. I drew a chess board on the floor and used bottle caps, pen clips, and pieces of rigifoam as chess pieces,” she said.

Wijesuriya came second in Sri Lanka’s first women’s national championship that was held in 1979. She got her first chessboard only after she won the national championship in 1980. It was a present from her maths teacher.

In 1992, she took part in the 30th Chess Olympiad in Manila, Philippines; 860 players from 102 countries took part and 20 gold medals were up for grabs. In that tournament, Wijesuriya won Sri Lanka’s first gold medal. “I was the only person from South Asia to win a gold medal. Nearly everyone else who won a gold medal was from former Soviet Union countries,” she said.

A fork in the road

When Sri Lankans win cricket and athletic events abroad, there is usually much fanfare at the airport. But when Wijesuriya came back to Sri Lanka, there was no one to greet her at the airport, other than her immediate family.

She was disheartened. She attributed this cold welcome to the game of chess being unknown in Sri Lanka.

At this time, she had already achieved the title of FIDE master. Chess offers a series of elusive titles obtained by winning tournaments, with the title of chess grandmaster being the most distinguished of them all.

Wijesuriya felt that going on this path was meaningless if people in Sri Lanka did not appreciate the game. She chose another path. “From that day, I decided to stop playing chess professionally and start teaching the game in Sri Lanka,” she said.

In 1997, she was the secretary of the National Chess Federation, but she wasn’t able to organise many coaching camps through it. Then she went to the Russian Cultural Centre in Colombo (now Russian House), and met then-director V.M. Polozkov and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Buddhapriya Ramanayake. With their help, she started the Anatoly Karpov Chess club in 1998.

For the past 26 years, she has worked tirelessly to promote the game of chess in Sri Lanka, having conducted 550 chess coaching camps across the island, in schools and for the Army, Navy, and Police.

They also invited several grandmasters, including Manuel Aaron and Aarthie Ramaswamy from India, to conduct workshops, and have organised provincial tournaments, distributed chess boards, and sent talented players for international tournaments.

She is grateful for the support the Russian House in Colombo has given her over the years. Several Russian Ambassadors attended chess awards ceremonies across the island, and the current director Maria Popova renovated the chess club room.

Today, Wijesuriya doesn’t regret her decision one bit. “I am very happy that I have trained a lot of students who have gone on to win tournaments in Asia and around the world,” she said.

Among her most talented students are Sachini Ranasinghe from Musaeus College and Ranindu Liyanage from Ananda College, both international masters. Out of all the students she has taught the foundations of chess to, more than a 1,000 have gone on to achieve Elo ratings.

Teaching style

Children come to Wijesuriya’s after-school chess clubs with their own rollable chess boards. They spend the hour playing against each other, and Wijesuriya points out strategies as they play.

She also teaches a bit of theory. Students are first taught the opening principles – controlling the centre, activating the bishops and knights, and making room for castling. Then they learn the main attacks of the middle game – pins, forks, discovered check, discovered attack, double check, and double attack – and how to avoid them. To practice the tricky manoeuvre of checkmating the king at the end, she makes the students solve checkmate puzzles. Checkmate in one move, followed by checkmate in two and three moves.

She doesn’t favour the practice of memorising sequences of moves like some coaches do. She says it’s far more important for students to be able to think instead. “What if the opponent plays a completely unexpected move?” she asked. “Then all the other memorised moves become useless.”

However, the availability of past games of players on the internet has changed the way students prepare for tournaments. To remain competitive, they have to do some research on their opponents beforehand. “The kind of openings they usually play and their style,” she said. 

In addition, the availability of chess playing computers and playing with strangers online has given players much more opportunities to practice. Playing versus a computer might not put pressure on you the same way a human opponent might, but Wijesuriya said: “The player who practices the most gets an advantage at the tournament, whether it’s against a computer or a real person.”

In 2023, Wijesuriya won the FIDE trainer award for her work towards popularising the game. She has taught at 10 schools in Colombo for many years. “The principals tell me, ‘Look Suneetha, the students in your chess team have gotten the highest marks in the grade 5 scholarship’,” she said, adding: “Chess players always excel at the subject they choose later on at university, or whatever path they choose.”

Wijesuriya invited children interested in playing chess to join her chess club at the Russian House in Colombo.

PHOTO Krishan Kariyawasam