Central Asian chess talent shone this week at the 2025 World Schools Team Championship in the United States, where players from dozens of countries competed in an event last held two years ago in Aktau, Kazakhstan.
India’s Velammal MHS School won gold, winning all eight of their matches at the event on a high school campus in Alexandria, Virginia.
Three teams from Kazakhstan were in the top ten final standings: the National School of Physics and Mathematics in second place, Astana 2 RSPM in fourth place and Seed Educational Complex in eighth. A team from Uzbekistan, Wisdom, came ninth.
Also, two of three players who received medals for individual performances were from Central Asia. The competitors who finished with perfect scores (eight out of eight) were Imangali Akhilbay from Kazakhstan’s National School of Physics and Mathematics, Edisa Berdibaeva from Kyrgyzstan’s School-Gymnasium No.11, Karakol and Pranav K. P. from India’s Velammal MHS School.
The competition, which ended Wednesday, was held under the auspices of FIDE, the international governing body of chess. It was sponsored by Freedom Holding Corp., an Almaty-based financial services company. The group’s CEO, Timur Turlov, is also president of the Kazakhstan Chess Federation. Turlov has led a drive to introduce chess into hundreds of schools in Kazakhstan, whose top players are also having an impact at elite international levels of the game.
“We believe that maybe this could be one of the solutions that can help our kids to better adapt to this fast-moving world,” Turlov said, according to Freedom Holding.
The Kazakhstan Chess Federation said some of its players in Alexandria were as young as 12 years old and “gained useful experience playing with strong opponents from all over the world.”
