Arjun Erigaisi signs $1.5 million deal

by Sagar Shah
12/19/2022 – Arjun Erigaisi has had an amazing year 2022 for his chess! In spite of his powerpacked recent performances, one question that always lingered around was, why does Arjun not have a permanent sponsor yet? Now he has landed a long term deal with Quantbox research. It might well be the biggest ever sponsorship deal in the history of Indian chess! In our report there is quite a bit of interesting video to watch.
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Arjun Erigaisi won the Tata Steel Challengers, the National Championships, Delhi Open, Silver on board three at the Olympiad, the Abu Dhabi Masters, Death Match 2.0, Tata Steel Chess India Blitz and much more! From an Elo of 2632 in classical chess he has pumped up his rating by almost 100 Elo points to reach the top 25 in the world. 

Now it was appropriate to seek a permanent sponsor. Well, Arjun landed a long term sponsorship deal with Quantbox Research. Located in Singapore, London, Bangalore and Gurgaon, Quantbox is team of programmers and mathematicians, entrenched in the best of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

2022 - the year of Arjun Erigaisi

Arjun Erigaisi with his mother at Tata Steel Chess India Blitz 2022 | Photo: Aditya Sur Roy

The year 2022 was one of the finest years for Arjun Erigaisi in his chess career. After his performance at the World Rapid and Blitz 2021 which ended on December 30th, the 18-year-old made a very big decision that he would stop attending college and devote all of his time to chess. This is something quite unique about Arjun – the boy looks calm from the exterior, but internally he has tremendous willpower. With this big decision he wanted to ensure that 2022 would be the kind of year he was looking forward to in his chess career.

On the 1st of January 2022, Arjun's rating was 2632. This is how he did in 2022:

At the 44th Chess Olympiad Arjun played for the India 1 team and remained unbeaten, scoring 8.5/11. Arjun won the silver medal for the country on board 3 and scored his first win over a 2750+ GM Leiner Dominguez in classical chess.

Arjun's trainer Srinath analyzes his brilliant win over Leiner Dominguez

Final moments of Arjun beating Magnus Carlsen at AimChess Rapid 2022. You may be interested to watch the difference in demeanour beween him and the commentator. 

Arjun receiving the winner's trophy from the Indian chess legend Vishy Anand (right) and Tata Steel CEO T.V. Narendran (left) | Photo: Lennart Ootes

Arjun Erigaisi announces his sponsor as Quantbox Research

 

 

This marks Arjun’s first-ever sponsorship deal in his chess career as a professional player of the sport. Quantbox was started by Prashant Singh an ex-chess player and a big fan of Arjun. The sponsorship is for five years and amounts to over $1.5 million. 

“We at Quantbox are backing Arjun not just as a sponsor but more so as fans!” says Prashant the CEO of Quantbox. "In the game of chess, we are extremely optimistic that Arjun will win the world title, and we would like to be there with him all the way.”

My take on the Arjun Erigaisi-Quantbox sponsorship deal

 

Sagar is an International Master from India with two GM norms. He loves to cover chess tournaments, as that helps him understand and improve at the game he loves so much. He is the co-founder and CEO of ChessBase India, the biggest chess news portal in the country. His YouTube channel has over a million subscribers, and to date close to a billion views. ChessBase India is the sole distributor of ChessBase products in India and seven adjoining countries, where the software is available at a 60% discount. compared to International prices.