Anuj Shrivatri of Madhya Pradesh has become India's 100th chess Grandmaster, completing the title requirements by winning the 7th ASEAN Plus Individual Open Chess Championship in the Philippines on Sunday, in a milestone that arrived on Diwali and capped a remarkable rise for Indian chess.
The 22-year-old from Katni became the first Grandmaster from Madhya Pradesh, and the ninth Indian to earn the title in 2026 alone. The result came 38 years after Viswanathan Anand became India's first Grandmaster in 1988, and it took the country's tally of Grandmasters to a century, a figure that would have seemed unimaginable when Anand stood alone as the nation's only holder of the game's highest title.
Shrivatri won the championship, the Governor Henry S. Oaminal Cup, in Ozamiz City in the Philippines, in a tournament held at the Asenso Global Youth Leadership and Sports Complex in Sinacaban, Misamis Occidental. He began the event with a defeat, then recovered in spectacular fashion, scoring seven points from nine rounds to finish half a point ahead of Vietnam's Nguyen Duc Hoa. Home favourite Nouri Alekhine took third place with six points.
The victory carried a special prize. The ASEAN Plus tournament was eligible to award a direct Grandmaster title to its winner, under a special format approved by the International Chess Federation, FIDE, which bypassed the usual requirement of three Grandmaster norms across 27 games and an Elo rating of 2500.
For the direct title to be available, the tournament had to feature at least four Grandmasters and six International Masters competing in every round, a condition that was met. Shrivatri finished the event with a performance rating of 2586, short of the 2600 required for a conventional Grandmaster norm, but the title was his by virtue of the win.
His peak rating was 2483, achieved in June, and he is expected to gain around 15 rating points from the championship. The numbers underline how the direct-title route worked in his favour: a player ranked India No. 76, still short of the conventional rating threshold, became a Grandmaster by winning a tournament that carried the title as its prize.
The All India Chess Federation moved quickly to celebrate the milestone. Its president, Nitin Narang, posted on X: "GRANDMASTER No. 100 FOR BHARAT! India achieves a historic milestone as Anuj Shrivatri becomes the country's 100th Grandmaster by winning the 7th ASEAN+ Individual Chess Championships 2026 in Ozamiz City, Philippines, securing the direct GM title! Onwards to 200 Grandmasters!"
The target of 200 Grandmasters, once a distant ambition, now looks less fanciful than it once did. India has gained its last five Grandmasters — from the 96th to the 100th — between July and November 2026, in the space of just five months. S. Aswath became the 98th in July, and V. S. Rathanvel became the 99th in the same month, crossing the 2500 Elo mark at the Guwahati Smart City International Open.
Shrivatri's title, coming so soon afterwards, has completed a burst of growth that reflects the depth of talent now emerging from the country's chess system.
The story behind the new Grandmaster is as striking as the milestone itself. Shrivatri, born in 2004, started playing chess in 2011 as a seven-year-old in Katni, a town in Madhya Pradesh not previously known for producing elite chess players. He became an International Master in 2019, the youngest from his state, at the age of 15 years and 31 days.
He was a school topper, and he went on to complete a B.Tech from Lovely Professional University in Punjab, specialising in artificial intelligence and machine learning, before securing a job with a German firm as a software engineer.
He gave up that job to pursue chess full time, a decision that carried real risk for a young professional with a secure career in a foreign company. On Sunday, that gamble paid off in the most emphatic way possible, with a national milestone and a place in the record books as the man who brought India its 100th Grandmaster.
The Grandmaster title is the highest a chess player can achieve, awarded by FIDE. To earn it by the conventional route, a player must achieve a FIDE classical rating of 2500 and fulfil three Grandmaster norms, each requiring a tournament performance rating of at least 2600 against strong opposition.
It is a demanding standard, and the fact that India now has 100 players who have met it — or, in Shrivatri's case, earned the title through a FIDE-approved direct-title event — speaks to the transformation of chess in the country.
That transformation began with Anand, who won the Shakti Finance International chess tournament in Coimbatore in 1987 on his way to becoming India's first Grandmaster the following year. For a long time, Anand was a solitary figure at the top of Indian chess, a five-time world champion whose success inspired a generation but who had few compatriots at the highest level. The last decade has changed that picture beyond recognition.
India now fields a deep bench of young Grandmasters, has won team medals at the Chess Olympiad, and counts several of the world's top players among its ranks.
Shrivatri's achievement fits that pattern, but it also has a character of its own. He is not a teenage prodigy in the mould of the young stars who have dominated Indian chess headlines in recent years. He is a 22-year-old who chose chess over a career in software engineering, who lost his first game of the championship and then won it anyway, and who did so from a state that had never before produced a Grandmaster.
His victory gives Madhya Pradesh a place on the Indian chess map, and it gives the country's chess community a story that is as much about persistence as about talent.
The Diwali timing added to the sense of occasion. The milestone came on the festival of lights, and it was described in coverage of the event as a Diwali milestone for Indian chess, a gift to the sport on a day when the country was celebrating. For the chess fraternity, it was a moment to savour: the hundredth Grandmaster, the first from a new state, and a win that came after a first-round defeat, the kind of recovery that has become the signature of Shrivatri's career.
The question now is what comes next, for Shrivatri and for Indian chess. For the new Grandmaster, the immediate task is to build on the title, to push his rating towards and beyond the 2500 mark by the conventional measure, and to establish himself among the country's leading players. For Indian chess, the target set by the federation president — 200 Grandmasters — is the next horizon, and the pace of the last five months suggests it may arrive sooner than anyone expected.
What is certain is that the journey from one Grandmaster to 100 has been one of the great sporting stories of modern India. It began with a single player in 1988, gathered pace slowly through the 1990s and 2000s, and has accelerated sharply in the last few years. Anuj Shrivatri, the 100th, will be remembered as the man who carried the count into three figures.
That he did it by winning a tournament in the Philippines after losing his first game, having given up a software engineering job to chase the dream, only makes the story better.
(Reporting based on The Times of India and The Indian Express.)