Four rounds into the 46th FIDE Chess Olympiad in Samarkand, the most instructive game India has played may not be a win at all.
It came in round two. The Open team, seeded second behind the United States, faced Indonesia. On the third board, D Gukesh — the reigning World Champion — drew with an International Master, Satria Duta Cahaya. The half-point was enough to drop Gukesh below 2700 on the live rating list for the first time since 2022. India still won the match 2.5–1.5.
Cahaya, to his credit, was candid about how it felt from the other side of the board.
“I thought there were many moments where he could have pushed for more.” — Satria Duta Cahaya, on his draw with World Champion Gukesh (Chess.com)
That sentence contains the whole Indian chess story of 2026. The world champion had a difficult afternoon, the team barely noticed, and the scoreboard kept moving in the right direction. A country that depends on one genius has a bad day when he does. A country with a system does not.
A team sheet with no weak board
The Olympiad is the sport’s largest team event: 400 teams registered in Samarkand — 208 in the Open section and 192 in the Women’s section — playing 11 classical rounds between September 16 and 27, after an opening ceremony on September 15. Each match is played over four boards, but every squad names five players, which makes depth as important as star power.
On the line-ups submitted to FIDE, India’s Open squad reads like a list of first-board players from other countries: Arjun Erigaisi (2759), R Praggnanandhaa (2750), Nihal Sarin (2718), Gukesh Dommaraju (2703) and Vidit Gujrathi (2697). The fifth name on the sheet is rated 2697 — a figure many federations would be delighted to see on their top board.
The Women’s team, seeded first in its section, is led by Humpy Koneru (2524), followed by Divya Deshmukh (2490) and Vaishali Rameshbabu (2489), with Vantika Agrawal and Savitha Shri B completing the squad. Both Indian teams are defending champions: India won the Open and Women’s gold medals in Budapest in 2024.
Through the first four rounds, both have kept winning. The Open side has beaten Indonesia, Italy (3–1, with Gukesh and Nihal Sarin winning and Praggnanandhaa and Arjun drawing) and Spain (3–1, including Gukesh’s 42-move win over Alexei Shirov and Arjun’s 36-move win over Maksim Chigaev). The Women’s side beat Greece 3.5–0.5 and Mongolia 3–1 along the way. It is a good start, not a result — seven of the eleven rounds remain — but it is a start that tells you something about the roster underneath it.
The measure of a chess power is not how high its best player climbs. It is how far its fifth-best player is from its first.
Not a miracle: a 38-year build-up
It is tempting to narrate Indian chess as a sudden burst of prodigies. The timeline says otherwise.
Viswanathan Anand became India’s first grandmaster in 1988, at 19. He went on to win the World Championship in 2000 and defended it for more than a decade, until he lost the title to Magnus Carlsen in 2013. For a generation of Indian children, chess had a national hero who was visibly, repeatedly, the best in the world.
Then came the institutional milestones. India hosted its first Chess Olympiad in Chennai in 2022 and won bronze medals in both sections. Two years later in Budapest it won gold in both. In 2024, Gukesh became the youngest player to win the Candidates Tournament and then the World Championship, at 18. By December 2024, India counted 85 grandmasters, 13 of them in the world’s top 100. Divya Deshmukh became India’s 88th grandmaster in July 2025, and current lists put the total above 90.
None of that is luck. Each step made the next one easier to imagine — and easier to fund.
The academy layer: champions who coach
The most consequential piece of Indian chess infrastructure of the past decade might be a very small one. In December 2020, Anand founded the WestBridge-Anand Chess Academy in partnership with WestBridge Capital. It did not try to teach thousands of children. It chose five.
The original fellows were Nihal Sarin, Praggnanandhaa, Raunak Sadhwani, Gukesh and Vaishali. Anand served as chief mentor, supported by trainers including Artur Yusupov, Sandipan Chanda and Grzegorz Gajewski. The stated aim was simple: make sure India always has young players rising quickly towards the top of the world rankings.
Look at the Samarkand squads and the design is visible. Of those five 2020 fellows, four — Nihal, Praggnanandhaa, Gukesh and Vaishali — are on India’s Olympiad rosters this month. The academy’s value was not just coaching; it was compressing the distance between a promising teenager and a five-time World Champion’s advice. That is a form of access that used to depend entirely on geography and luck.
For decades, Indian chess talent rose despite the system. The striking change is that a system now exists to catch it.
The pandemic that changed the board
The other structural shift arrived in 2020 through a laptop screen. With the world locked down, FIDE staged its first Online Olympiad, and India — a country with millions of internet users and limited access to top-level over-the-board events — was suddenly playing on level terms.
The final is remembered for its ending. India and Russia drew their first match 3–3, with all six games drawn. In the second, Nihal Sarin and Divya Deshmukh lost on time after being disconnected during a widespread internet outage, which FIDE attributed to a Cloudflare failure. Russia was initially declared the winner; India appealed, and FIDE’s president decided to award gold to both teams. The medal was shared, but the message was not: Indian players could compete with the best without leaving home.
For a child in a smaller city, that matters enormously. Rating points, training partners, analysis tools and streamed games are now a phone screen away. A sport that once required travel budgets and personal contacts became a sport that required a decent connection and a great deal of curiosity.
The women’s story is the proof that it is a system
If Indian chess were driven by a single prodigy, the women’s side would look thin. It does not.
In July 2025, at the Women’s World Cup in Batumi, Georgia, 19-year-old Divya Deshmukh — then an International Master from Nagpur — reached the final and met the veteran Humpy Koneru in an all-Indian showdown. After two classical draws, Divya won the rapid tiebreak with the black pieces, taking the title, $50,000 and the grandmaster title along with it. She became the 44th woman and the 88th Indian to earn the highest rank in chess, and secured a place in the 2026 Candidates Tournament, alongside Humpy and Tan Zhongyi.
A teenager beating a two-decade veteran in a World Cup final, with both wearing India’s colours, is what a maturing ecosystem looks like. Koneru is playing board one for India in Samarkand; Deshmukh is on board two; Vaishali, who came through the same Chennai chess culture as her brother Praggnanandhaa, is on board three. A veteran, a World Cup-winning teenager and a Chennai-trained rival, all on one roster.
What ‘system’ actually means
Strip away the ratings and there are four ingredients visible in the Samarkand line-ups.
Role models. Anand’s career made chess aspirational; Gukesh’s and Divya’s made it plausible for the next child. Mentorship. Structured programmes such as the WestBridge-Anand Academy connect prospects with elite coaches at exactly the age when guidance matters most. Access. Online play removed the requirement to live near a strong club. Institutional confidence. Hosting a home Olympiad and winning gold abroad made federations, sponsors and families more willing to invest.
It is also worth noticing what the roster says about geography. Gukesh, Praggnanandhaa and Vaishali all come from Chennai; Arjun Erigaisi from Warangal; Vidit Gujrathi from Nashik; Nihal Sarin from Thrissur; Divya Deshmukh from Nagpur; Humpy Koneru from Andhra Pradesh. Chennai’s outsized presence shows how much a strong local ecosystem matters — and the spread of other cities shows the model is travelling.
The tests still ahead
A system is only proven when it survives pressure, and Samarkand offers plenty. With seven rounds still to play, the United States is the top seed in the Open section, and hosts Uzbekistan — seeded third — are playing before a home crowd. The Women’s section has its own contenders, with Georgia, China and Kazakhstan all seeded behind India.
There are harder questions beyond the tournament. Can the pipeline reach beyond a handful of cities? Can the women’s structure keep pace with the men’s? Can grassroots coaching become as good as elite mentoring? None of these has a fast answer. But the fact that they are now system questions — about coaches, funding and access — rather than questions about whether the next prodigy will show up is itself the sign of progress.
The real Indian chess boom is not the medals. It is that a talented ten-year-old anywhere in the country can now imagine a path to the board Gukesh sits at.
India will win or lose in Samarkand on the board, one clock at a time. But whichever way the final standings fall, the more important result is already on the table: the story of Indian chess is no longer about who the next star will be. It is about the machine that keeps making them.
