Encouraging Update: The Most Chess-Obsessed Country in the World | A Story Worth Sharing

This article was originally published in the February edition of Rotary magazine.

It’s 9 o’clock on a Sunday morning and the temperature is soaring toward the 90s as hundreds of children make their way toward the iconic Marina Beach in the southern Indian metropolis of Chennai. Yet there’s not a towel or sand pail in sight — only water bottles and chessboards tucked under arms as the kids veer toward a college along the shore.

Here, over the next several hours, knights will be sacrificed, pawns queened and kings toppled at this fiercely competitive tournament — one of hundreds held almost daily in what is arguably the most chess-obsessed country in the world.

Would you like to read more good news about India, Teachers, Education, and Poverty?

A wide-eyed six-year-old approaches a large photograph of Gukesh Dommaraju, the teenage prodigy from Chennai who at 18 became the youngest world chess champion ever in 2024. “Maybe one day I can be like him,” the child says, an aspiration unquestionably held by children — and parents — all over the country.

From its roaring metropolises to its bucolic villages, India has an enthusiasm for chess on par with that for professional basketball in the United States, or Premier League football in England. And like these franchises, competitive chess is coming to be seen as a golden ticket to international stardom and prestige for young players with the talent and drive to make it to the top.

But beyond the elite academies nurturing budding prodigies, and high-stakes tournaments offering the prospect of cash prizes, corporate sponsorships and social media fame, a more modest but notably important outcome has emerged from the humble game of chess in India. It is one in which clubs and districts around the country are sponsoring tournaments and collaborating with chess academies to expand access to the game, recognizing it presents a pathway to educational advancement and a route out poverty for the communities they serve.

At the Victorious Chess Academy in the western city of Pune, in a little shrine decorated with flowers and incense, instructors have made a traditional rangoli — a drawing with colored powder — of the Hindu god Ganesha. But there is a twist: Ganesha, a popular patron of letters and learning, is reading a book of chess rules. For the students here, says founder Kapil Lohana, “chess is a religion.”

Lohana regularly organizes tournaments. His academy coaches students in more than 30 countries; one student, Harshit Raja, became India’s 69th grandmaster in 2021.

Playing chess competitively helped Lohana find a route out of poverty. He grew up on a cotton farm in central Maharashtra state’s drought-prone Yavatmal district, known tragically for its high rates of farmer suicides.

“In 2003, I told my father that I didn’t want to be a farmer and came to Pune to participate in my first chess tournament,” he recalls. His father disapproved, but Lohana won a small cash purse and spent the next few years competing and living off his winnings.

With this aim, he founded Victorious Chess Academy and started a special grandmaster training program for advanced players, offering discounts for rising stars who couldn’t afford tuition.

One of those rising stars is 12-year-old Om Ramgude. Rated an 1,836 by the International Chess Federation, Om already has his eye on the grandmaster title. He was barely more than a toddler when he began playing chess online.

“I’d downloaded the chess app for myself, but it was Om who quickly began solving puzzles and winning games online to advance to the highest level,” says his mother, Manisha Dayanand Ramgude, a software developer in her 40s. “Can you imagine? He was only five at the time!” Marooned at home during the pandemic, little Om immersed himself in online matches, often challenging — and besting — players far older.

Meanwhile, more and more people, especially parents, are coming to view chess as a way to improve academic performance, decision making, critical thinking and memory skills. In Pune, Aparna Bodhe has been bringing her five-year-old twins, Parikshita and Aradhita, to the White Knight Chess Academy for coaching.

“Playing chess has definitely calmed them down,” she says, as her girls play and giggle at a chessboard. “Earlier, it was impossible to make them sit, but three months of chess has made them a little more focused and able to sit down and concentrate.”

Many of the young players have improved their grades at school, says Ashirwad Tupe, who founded the White Knight Chess Academy in 2019. He says each international win echoes through the halls, with students as young as four seemingly able to recall every move of those top matches.

SP Sethuraman, a two-time national champion who practices over six hours a day and became a grandmaster at 17 in 2011, agrees the game uniquely challenges the mind. “There are only 64 squares on the board, but every game I play, there are new challenges,” he says. “Playing chess makes your memory razor-sharp.”

The link between chess and academics is backed by research. One study found that rural Indian schoolchildren who received a year of chess training significantly improved their academic performance in subjects like math and science compared with a control group. The researchers observed that the game helped students focus, visualize, think ahead, weigh their options and juggle multiple considerations simultaneously. A 2019 study that focused on schoolchildren in Bangladesh found chess training not only improved grades but taught them to evaluate risk.

In chess, successful players think several moves ahead, sacrificing pieces to open paths to victory. “And yet, there’s the danger that if they miscalculate, they could lose not only that piece but the game itself,” Tupe says. “The game teaches players to strategize, adapt and take hard decisions under pressure.”

Indians have been using chess as an instrument of strategy since at least the seventh century, when the ancient Indian game of chaturanga first appears in the historical record. The name chaturanga translates to “four parts,” referring to the military divisions of infantry, cavalry, elephants and chariots — which later evolved into the pawn, knight, bishop and rook pieces of the modern game. By the ninth century, the Persians were playing the war strategy game, and it evolved into shatranj. From there it spread across the world as chess. Legend has it that some kings played chess using live human beings — often their vanquished enemies and slaves — as the pieces.

Chess in India has come a long way since, with the nation emerging as a modern-day world chess power. India has about 90 grandmasters (up from five in 2000) and over 30,000 players rated by the International Chess Federation, known as FIDE. Among them is a three-year-old who late last year became the youngest player in chess history to earn a rating after beating opponents in their 20s and edging out the previous record-holder: Another toddler from India who was just a month older at the time. At the end of last year, India’s top 10 male players boasted an average rating of 2,714, not far behind the highest individual rating ever achieved, a 2,882 first held by Norway’s Magnus Carlsen in 2014. Only the U.S. had a higher average men’s rating. India’s top 10 women, meanwhile, averaged 2,404, just behind China.

Behind these statistics are dazzling personal stories: Viswanathan Anand, the five-time world champion who ignited India’s chess renaissance by becoming the country’s first grandmaster in 1988; Gukesh Dommaraju, the teenage prodigy who claimed the world title at just 18; Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu, who stunned the world at 18 by defeating Carlsen in 2024; and his elder sister, 24-year-old Vaishali Rameshbabu, who made history in Uzbekistan in September by winning the FIDE Women’s Grand Swiss for a second time.

Today, chess remains a prized tool for building resilience and fortitude. “On the board, one wrong move can change the game, but chess teaches you how to defend, to stay calm, to learn and to fight back with focus,” says Chennai-based chess coach N. Krithika. These are all skills that can resonate far beyond the chessboard and have the power to change the trajectories of not only individual lives, but entire communities.

Marottichal is a remote village in the southern state of Kerala known for its verdant hills and breathtaking waterfalls, but its true claim to fame is chess. Over 4,500 of Marottichal’s residents — some 75 percent of its population — are active chess players. In 2016, the village hosted an event in which more than 1,000 people played chess simultaneously.

This is a far cry from the 1970s and early ’80s, when the village was a regional hub for illicit alcohol production. Marottichal’s farmers found that making alcohol required less labor and provided an easy income. The combination of more money and more downtime, and the omnipresence of booze, contributed to a rise of vice economies. Alcoholism surged, as did gambling.

In the late 1980s, Charaliyil Unnikrishnan, a former Maoist rebel and a Marottichal native, returned home and was dismayed by what he saw. With help from the wives and mothers of liquor producers, he led a group that raided gambling dens and destroyed illicit alcohol supplies. Then, when he realized that the men needed an alternative pastime, he introduced them to chess.

Incredibly, the game caught the collective fancy of the village. Cases of alcohol addiction began to decline as dropouts went back to school, farmers returned to their harvests, and many local chess players, including Unnikrishnan himself, began playing competitively.

Today, he runs a popular chess-themed tea shop in Marottichal, and across the village, from bus stops to rice paddy fields, players can be found hunched over chessboards. The village has its own chess association, hosts local and regional tournaments, and teaches its young residents chess as part of the school curriculum.

Unnikrishnan — or Unni maman (uncle), as he is locally known — says that by teaching players the power of good decision making, chess has become an alternative to destructive behavior. Much like chess taught Aparna Bodhe’s twins to sit still and focus, the game has been shown to improve planning and cognitive reflection tasks in adults, as well. In 2025, researchers found chess players showed greater preference for future rewards over short-term gains, reflecting a delayed gratification that is essential to winning a chess match.

Coach Rajesh Oza paces up and down a classroom filled with teenage chess players, teaching them a highly unusual style of play, one that unfolds not on the board in front of them but on a chessboard in their minds.

In 2002, he became the national blind chess champion and the first blind chess player in India to earn a FIDE international rating. Today, he teaches his students to visualize the game in their minds like he does, though they can see perfectly well.

“This frees their mind of clutter, leaving room only for strategizing on the board,” he says. “I could have never imagined that someone who can’t see would get a life, career and even the perfect life partner because of chess!” (He met his wife in a chess competition.) “I may be blind, but chess has given me a vision for a bright future.”

One of the tournament competitors, 49-year-old P Prema, says she enjoys the level playing field chess affords. “What attracts me to chess is that I don’t need to play it as a para sport,” she explains, drawing a contrast with sports that demand physical ability, though she does that too. Using a wheelchair since she contracted polio in childhood, she is an accomplished para table tennis and badminton player. She is working on improving her chess game so she can get a FIDE rating.

Some players leave Krithika’s tournament early — so they can play in another tournament. Chennai is not known as India’s chess mecca for nothing: This particular September weekend alone, the city is hosting almost 100 tournaments, big and small.

But young players aspiring to improve their FIDE ratings say that even this is not enough. Swathi Kumar KP and Sujay Remileon S, participants in an under-21 tournament in Chennai, say they need to play in at least 100 tournaments to improve their FIDE ratings. Both practice for at least four hours a day but say that playing in professional tournaments is critical. It can be a long, hard slog.

The spirited girls even work references to the game into everyday moments. “The other day, when I asked them to sit with me in front of the family puja (altar), Parikshita asked me to seriously think what ‘my endgame’ was,” their mother says with a laugh.

So, what is the endgame for her twins? “I don’t know how far they’ll go in chess,” she says. For now, she’s simply happy the game is helping them to focus and to know that their choices have consequences. As any chess player will tell you, your next move, in a game or in life, can lead to a costly blunder or momentous opportunity.

Scrolling photos courtesy of Siddharth Behl / Rotary magazine.