As a young chess player, growing up in Chennai, I remember getting chess books from Russian Cultural centre, the Connemara Library and the British Council, not only to improve my game, but to understand and admire the brilliance of Mikhail Tal, Jose Capablanca, Bobby Fischer, Garry Kasparov, Anatoly Karpov and so many more.
Even as we enjoyed playing against good opponents, we also had to endure the pain of playing with novices for lack of better options in the neighbourhood.
In today’s time, even as five Indian players competed in the Candidates tournament in Toronto (Canada) to decide the Challenger for the world crown, it was amazing to witness the way chess has grown.
Technology has literally shrunk the world. If one gets on to a chess platform on the web, one can play with anyone logged into the system around the world, from United States to Sweden, Indonesia or Brazil. It can be done any time of the day or night, and the time format can be chosen too.
Instant analysis
Most importantly, you can have the analysis done within seconds after each game. You get points according to the rating of the opponent. You get to know the accuracy level of your game as well as your opponent’s. Every move is categorised into brilliant, great, best, excellent, good, book, inaccurate, mistake, miss and blunder.
And when the computer is analysing the game, it also suggests what could have been a better option and the line one could have taken. In summary, it tells how you fared in the opening, middle-game and end-game. You can also follow different lines at the click of a mouse.
All this for a nominal fee, and you can stay engaged with brilliant players around the world and keep getting better. It is fun and absolute enjoyment. The mind is kept occupied in a healthy way, and it is as good as meditation !
Technology has definitely enhanced the performance of players, not only in chess but also across a variety of sports. But that is only one aspect, as one gets to chat with one of the wizards, Megha Gambhir, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Stupa Sports Analytics, who is mostly travelling around the world, selling technology in sports to the international market.
A technocrat, married to a table tennis player and coach Deepak Malik, Megha ventured into sports to find some solutions that would help the players enhance their performance. Basically, the two made video and data analysis to help the paddlers. Stupa was established in February 2020, just before Covid froze the world.
“Through video analysis, the players can understand where they are hitting the forehand, backhand and the heat map of the balls. They can evaluate their rallies. They get the data points and evaluation of their foot work, etc. We were working with 40 of the top 100 players in the world. They were also keen to understand their opponents’ strategy,” said Megha.
Analyse and improve
The focus was on helping players and coaches keen to analyse their performance and improve.
“Many coaches did feel that technology would replace them. Yet, we were able to work with many national federations around the world, helping them with real-time analysis of the videos of the matches and practice sessions. For the Tokyo Olympics, we supported close to 25% of the table tennis players but the revenue was not great. It was not exactly the ‘right product market fit’. We had to keep evolving. From 2022 till now we have shifted our product base,” said Megha, who has a rich experience as she has worked in HCL, Cognizant, PepsiCo, American Express, World Bank, United Nations on the technology side.
Megha realised how many areas in sports were not technology-driven. “We figured out that there was a huge gap which the federations, league organisers and sports organisations struggled to bridge. There is a huge leakage of data and media because the federations are still maintaining their memberships and data on excel sheets. They are sitting on a large amount of data and media which they are not able to monetise. They are spending money on player development,” she said.
Apart from cricket and football, most of the other sports struggle to get into the limelight as they are not aware of ways to have enough data for fan engagement on television.
“Even in badminton, which is widely played in India now, the world-level tournaments do not have anything other than line-calling ‘in and out’ with technology. There is not much information available for the fans to understand what exactly the players are doing, what the strategy of one player is against the other. The commentators, too, don’t have enough information to talk about. These are the areas we identified,” she said.
“Business started once we solved the puzzle. We now work in more than 15 countries. We started with table tennis and now we are getting ready to step into badminton, pickleball and tennis. We have end-to-end solutions on a SaaS (Software as a Service)-based platform. It helps the federations and league organisers to manage membership, player registrations, tournament management, league management, streaming on the web, managing and curating a layer of AI on top of it which helps them in personalising the data and availing data points for the players, fans and coaches. Through our platform, players can access all their historic information, trends and patterns, how they have been playing, what streams they have been part of, watch their highlights and so on. They can enable monetisation of the data and media from the same platform,” Megha said.
Revenue option
More than being successful in the business of sports through technology, Megha was happy to generate revenue for the sports federations.
“The moment we started doing table tennis, we had soccer and cricket people coming to us and saying, ‘we do have different platforms but no end to end platform’. They were having multiple technology partners and struggle integrating them”, she said.
Everything in one platform has been a dream exercise, the strong point of her organisation. Megha pointed out that it was not planned at the beginning, but achieved along the way.
“It was not as if we were enlightened one day that this has to be done. It was a journey. Our second product is focused on fan engagement for the television audience. Doing interesting stats, graphics for the broadcasters. We have done it for table tennis. We will do it for badminton soon. We use AI for personalising and curating the data points for the respective stakeholders, could be fans, coaches, players and the information they should be seeing which is more relevant and more valuable for them. It is more for the fan engagement, doing the real time analysis of the game and putting it, merged with graphics”, she said.
Since the work is done for broadcasters also, the analysis is obviously real time. “We get the analysis in milliseconds and the highlights of the matches right after it is done”, she said.
It has been a roller-coaster for Megha in merging technology with sports, basically solving the problems all along, and helping the growth of the ecosystem.
The video analysis may also soon become real time for the players, thanks to the collaboration with the international federations, which in turn will get a chance to monetise the idea.
“We are also working with world federations. We are trying to implement the idea of putting up our cameras for all the matches and having them analysed real time, so that the world federation can start selling this as a service to the players”, said Megha.
If that is one bright step forward at the international level, Megha has another interesting idea that may revolutionise sports further.
“We are planning to have smart courts, in which we will have the cameras fixed. Players and coaches can access real time information. We are doing it in padel and tennis. We will make announcements soon”, she said.
Sports for fitness is one of the mantras that is enlarging the sports base.
“People are choosing sports as a fitness regime. Badminton has grown because the game is also looked at as a fitness exercise. People may not want to go to gym, but do want to go and play badminton because that is their way of burning the calories. So these new games have huge potential. Pickleball is relating more to fitness than leisure, and can grow really well”, she said.
Smart move
Now comes the most interesting part. The smart move is to have smart courts in which a player scans a QR code on the camera and starts playing. Once done, they can generate their highlights for the social media along with nice stats.
“This is how we can crack the leisure market. People love the data more and more. They want to understand their body, their movements, everything. If they find the price reasonable, they are going to enjoy this. The motivation will be to put it on the social media. There will be ranking points which would help identify the right partners to play”, she said.
Happy to be earning the big money from abroad, Megha is more focused in helping the growth of Indian sports ecosystem, by keeping the charges minimal. Soon, there could be thousands of smart courts around the country, fitted with cameras, ready to churn out social media content for the leisure players.
Megha is keen to collaborate with the Union Sports Ministry to have conclaves and sessions to educate the stakeholders in Indian sports, about the benefits of technology and the best way forward to take sports to a higher strata.
“Our aim is to help the sports federations start using technology in small areas. The people are in a cocoon and afraid of letting technology break into their domain. We hope to break the barrier and get in. Our focus is to support them, make them more efficient and be more effective in terms of the development of sports,” she said.
There are interesting times for Indian sports as technology explosion promises to accelerate the growth.
