Bengaluru: There is perhaps something a bit strange about already having become a world champion and still being treated like a boy who might one day arrive.
“I lost lot of time. Volodar Murzin knows the feeling. The title brought invitations, confidence and the comforting knowledge that stronger players could no longer intimidate him quite so easily. “I started to trust myself more. Murzin grew up in the shadow of an abusive father. Chess was both a gift and a torment. It was huge damage. His mother, Ekaterina, saw this as an opportunity to save her children.
He won the World Rapid Championship in 2024, ahead of top players like Fabiano Caruana, Hikaru Nakamura and Jan-Krzysztof Duda. At 18, he was the second youngest to do so. Chess arrived as a saviour when he was 11. His victory in the U-12 European Youth Championship led to an invitation from Sergey Nesterov’s Prof Chess Club in Khimki. She left their home in Nizhny Tagil and took him and his sisters along, travelling more than 1,700 km to Khimki.
His father called it the “devil’s game” and stopped him from travelling to tournaments for two years.
Murzin is around 2650 in classical chess, not yet among the game’s elite, and he knows what that means in a chess world increasingly crowded with teenagers who arrive with extraordinary ratings attached to their names. His targets are straightforward, even if not easy—2700, the top 10, eventually the classical World Championship. The boy-who-might-one-day-arrive label though remains. It’s his third successive year at the Tech Mahindra Global Chess League on the Prodigy board. He’s with the Alpine APL Pipers side, which has Magnus Carlsen as its Icon player. Perhaps ratings are partly to blame. “I hope it will change soon. “I want to change my federation. I have no contact with the Russian federation and receive no support from them. “Right now, I can’t play Bundesliga. Some other tournaments too. If I change federation, I can play more tournaments in Europe.”
“I’m not worse than those on the Superstars team (in the GCL) because I have higher ratings than some of them,” he says, smiling. There is no angst in the way he says it. He has reached out to other national federations, he says.
