Comedians On Board, Part 2
Comedians on Board—Part Two will be hosted on Chess.com by Samay Raina, one of India's leading stand-up comedians. This event will feature more than 20 of India's top comedians and will run for a week. This event will be broadcasted on Raina's YouTube channel and occasionally on ChessTV.
Comedians on Board (pun intended!) was started by Raina in the last week of March. The event was an instant hit during the lockdown, seeing great viewership and interest. This event is the sequel and will feature the same format.
Almost all of India's best comics will be playing in this event—most notably, Tanmay Bhat, Biswa Kalyan Rath, Abish Matthew, and Rohan Joshi among others. The runner-up of the first event, Kunal Rao, is the clear favorite because the winner of the previous edition, Akash Mehta, won't be competing.
Day one will be an elimination match between two players. Each player will have a maximum of 10 minutes to make all their moves without any increment. The games will start July 1 at 3:30 p.m. Indian time (3 a.m. Pacific time, 6 a.m. Eastern time, 11 a.m. Central European time).
All winners will qualify for day two and play in the quarterfinals. Pairings for day one have already been drawn.
The comedians have played several exhibitions and fun matches against top players in the chess world such as GMs Viswanathan Anand, Anish Giri, Vidit Gujrathi, Pentala Harikrishna, Baskaran Adhiban, S.P. Sethuraman, Harika Dronavalli as well as IM Tania Sachdev, WFM Alexandra Botez and the famous chess YouTuber, Agadmator.
On a more serious note, Raina has struck a chord with the Indian audience and with the help of his friends and fans has managed to raise more than INR 25,0000 ($33,000) for charity in the last 100 days.
A professional stand-up comedian, Raina is an ardent chess lover. After the pandemic started, he began streaming chess regularly and has more than 179,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel. For the last two months, he has regularly streamed and learned chess alongside Gujrathi, India's number-two.
On Chess.com India's YouTube channel, Raina pitted his phone's engine against his laptop's engine!
Rakesh Kulkarni is the Director of Indian Social Media for Chess.com and a correspondent on chess in India.
Rakesh has earned the International Master title and is a former Commonwealth Blitz Champion and a Commonwealth Bronze medallist in the junior category. Rakesh has a Masters of Commerce degree in Management & Business administration. He now is a professional chess player and trains young talents across the globe on chess.com
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