Of the many things Anand Mahindra has achieved in his career, bringing an early Christmas to sports fans in Mumbai is probably not one he had accounted for. Yet, in mid-December, chess turned into the city’s unlikeliest spectacle as over 15,000 fans streamed into the storied Royal Opera House to watch elite players lock horns in a tournament envisioned by the chairman of the Mahindra Group.
This wasn't the first time, though, that the game’s biggest names had come to India. The Tata Steel Chess India Open is an annual fixture for the rapid and blitz formats on the FIDE (the sport’s governing body) calendar; in 2022, the 44th Chess Olympiad was staged in Chennai, and in November, the stars gathered in Goa for the FIDE World Cup.
But the third edition of the Tech Mahindra Global Chess League (GCL), the sport’s first ever franchise league, wasn’t chess as the purists know it. In a sport that’s traditionally been individual, GCL flipped the script as teams squared off; staid formals were swapped for coloured tees; a theme song set to tune by AI bookended contests; and matches unfolded in front of a live audience—a unicorn of sorts in elite chess—plugged into commentary through headphones.
And once the clocks stopped, the players emerged onto the front courtyard to fevered choruses—of ‘Ali’ (French GM Alireza Firouzja), ‘Fabi’ (American GM Fabiano Caruana), ‘Anish’ (Dutch GM Anish Giri), what have you—and a clamour for autographs and selfies that makeshift barricades could barely contain. It’s a telling shift of fandom in a country that has, for decades, chanted ‘Anand’ (five-time world champion Viswanathan Anand) and has only recently graduated to the likes of ‘Gukesh’ (reigning world champion D Gukesh) or ‘Pragg’ (R Praggnanandhaa).
Some like GM Srinath Narayanan—the head coach for American Gambits, one of the six competing franchisees—or American GM Irina Krush, who was here for commentary, got closer to the fans as they walked into the fan zone to play simuls, while Anand, who spent almost as much time signing autographs after every match as he would to wrap up a blitz game, conceded in an interview with Forbes India that he feels this is the closest chess has come to being a spectator sport. “I think it’s very much like the IPL [of chess],” said Anand, who was brought on board by Mahindra to build the league.
“You do not grow a sport by amplifying its volume; you grow it by creating a stronger emotional bond with audience and fans,” Mahindra, the chairman of the group that has a market cap of over Rs 8,000 crore, told Forbes India in an email interview. The trigger for his foray into chess came during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, when the Chess Olympiad was being contested online. “I found myself watching it avidly since India and Russia were vying for the title. What struck me was not only the quality of play, but also the energy surrounding it in new media, including the commentary and the casual conversations. Chess suddenly felt less distant and far more of a community exercise.”
Mahindra isn’t a stranger to extricating a sport from the backbench and fashioning it into an audience-focussed product. Over a decade ago, he conceived the Pro Kabaddi League (PKL) that was launched in 2014 and that has now shed its rustic, rural image to become the second-most viewed league on Indian television after IPL. When a few chess content creators reached out to him during the pandemic, and then Arkady Dvorkovich, the FIDE president, asked him “are you serious about a chess league”, he was game for a repeat.
“What worked with PKL was never about reinventing kabaddi; it was about refining it. It was about respecting the essence of the sport while presenting it in a way that allowed audiences to feel invested. Popularity followed authenticity, not the other way around,” Mahindra said further. “That philosophy carries naturally into GCL. The objective is not to replicate a model, but to apply a mindset, build patiently, and let audiences form their own relationship with it.”
While Mahindra made personal investments into PKL, he felt the chess league was the perfect branding platform for a cerebral business like Tech Mahindra, the IT services and consulting firm housed within the Mahindra Group. “We saw chess as one of the fastest growing opportunities,” says Dubey of Tech Mahindra. “As a 2,000-year-old game, 70 percent of the adult population in countries like the US, the UK, India etc have played chess at some point. We are seeing that popularity growing year after year. What started as a niche sport is increasingly becoming mainstream.”
“Jay and Uday play regularly and he beats his father often. That’s the trigger for a chess franchise,” says Kailash Kandpal, the CEO of Insurekot Sports. “That apart, with Mr Mahindra and Tech Mahindra backing it, we feel there is a lot of potential for the sport and the league.”
With elite players and rock-solid owners locked in for the tournament, the first box had been ticked. But, every sport requires that X-factor to attain viewership: The dopamine hit, which doesn’t come easily to a sedate, contemplative game of chess. This is where FIDE, the governing body stepped in with its blessings for a league that was part-serious, but part-entertainment as well.
“We thought about something that is not just your professional chess, but which can be self-sustainable, earn money, and be business. That was exactly the approach of Anand Mahindra,” says Dvorkovich, president, FIDE. “To make it possible, we need to think about a show, not just pure sport. And looks like, given this success story, bringing new partners is the right way to go.”
Which meant the GCL could go ahead and tweak rules to turn matches short and snappy, and results into cliffhangers. While the moves in chess are played on the clock, some of the classical format games can outlast patience. Not too long ago, during the 2024 World Championship, Gukesh played out a 5 hour 23 minute marathon draw with Ding Liren. “That does not encourage fan engagement,” says Dubey of Tech Mahindra. So every GCL game adopted the rapid format, played across six boards, spanning 40 minutes with an increment of two seconds thereafter, making it easier for people to follow and patience to hold.
What did it take to convince broadcasters JioStar to come on board for a sport that has a limited following? “The broadcasters recognised that chess has an audience that’s obsessive,” says Gourav Rakshit, the league commissioner. “And there is a larger audience that consumes it on Reels and Shorts. The idea was to bring them into watching games.” So, the GCL worked with them to make a package that was more accessible in both English and Hinglish.
“The commentary-through-headphone gambit was the one we played for the first time and it was really powerful in catalysing audiences,” adds Rakshit. “We’ve never been a chess-crazy country even though we’ve always had a lot of chess played. The tipping point is happening now. I haven’t seen this fandom before. This is where chess starts going from a played sport to a spectator sport.”
“Chess players are realising more and more that in order to make it a sustainable sport, they have to play their part. Earlier, they just wanted to come and play, but now they understand they have to show up at interviews, meet fans,” says Sagar Shah, an International Master (IM) and the co-founder of the popular Chessbase India, the online repository of all things chess. Shah, who was a commentator at the GCL, points to how fan connect can significantly amplify the game’s reach. Viewership for livestreams on his YouTube channel typically ranges from 100,000 to 400,000, he says, but spikes sharply when an Indian player is in contention—most recently, it was till the quarterfinals of the FIDE World Cup, as long as Arjun Erigaisi, the last Indian standing, remained alive in the tournament.
Add to it the fact that, contrary to their reputation of working in silos, many players have warmed up to team dynamics—perhaps evident from the smile that Gukesh managed to extract despite his loss to American GM and World No 2 Hikaru Nakamura as his team, PBG Alaskan Knights, won the match against Nakamura’s American Gambits in the round-robin stage.
“One of the things that is consistently overlooked is that chess is very lonely in terms of a career. If you were to ask every player, they would probably say the worst part about playing chess is that you feel like it's just all about you. There's no real interaction, engagement,” says Nakamura, a five-time US champion. “Being a part of a team is great, because it introduces this aspect where if you win games, you feel like you're doing something more.”
Nakamura is a veteran of forging human connections in the sport, and taking it beyond its niche following. In 2018, he began to livestream a World Championship match between Caruana and Carlsen as an attempt to distract himself from a bad patch, and continued through the next year as he began to enjoy interacting with an audience. He sensed an explosion of interest during the Covid-induced shutdown—around April 2020, he had about 100,000 followers on Twitch, where he was live-streaming; by August, he crossed a million.
“It’s often said that 500 million people play chess. But in terms of the understanding of the game, I would argue that number is far lower,” says Nakamura. “For chess to be sustainable, you can’t solely focus on the game. The audience has to come back. What the GCL does, be it through the team format, through storylines built around individual players, they are making spectators buy tickets and come and watch the game.”
Adds Erigaisi, currently the India No 1 and World No 5: “Most of us enjoy team events a bit more because they happen so rarely. Most chess players know each other, but not too well. Here, you get to make new friends and interact with new people, which most of us enjoy.”
“We see a marked difference between the audience that turned up in London or Dubai versus the fans that turned up in Mumbai. We're far more convinced [about GCL] after the third season in India than we were after seasons 1 and 2,” says Suhail Chandhok, sports commentator and the CEO of upGrad Mumba Masters. “I hope the GCL stays in India,” he says further, adding that the ‘cult-fan following’ on display will spur sponsors to look at chess as a sport worth backing. “This is engagement at both a B2B and a B2C level. After this season, the conversation with the sponsors will change.”
While the league itself has seen a 10x or so rise in sponsorship revenue season-on-season—one of its key earners aside from franchise and streaming fees—the franchises have also benefitted from the local connect. American Gambits, for instance, has raised sponsorship thrice the amount of last year’s, while Insurekot Sports, too, has seen a 25-30 percent hike. “Plus we get a share of the central pool of revenue, around 8.75 percent of GCL’s revenue, which forms around 30-35 percent of our topline. In absolute value, that has more than doubled,” says Prachura PP, the co-owner of the team and a former FIDE-rated player himself. In only its second year—after taking over from the Chingari Gulf Titans in 2024—American Gambits was on the cusp of breaking even, but missed the mark after it fell out of the top 3 and earned a smaller prize purse, the third revenue lever.
On GCL’s sponsorship roster this year have been tech bellwethers like AMD, AWS, IBM, Microsoft and Google Cloud that, on one hand, reflect GCL’s ability to connect with the tech-savvy audience as well as chess’s rising tango with AI, a phenomenon that Anand had alluded to when he had told Forbes India that it feels like a different sport to what it was 10 years ago, and he presumes it will be another different ball game 10 years down the line. Says a spokesperson from AMD, the US-based semiconductor giant: “Chess celebrates the same values as AMD: Deep problem solving, systems thinking, disciplined execution. The league allows us to engage with an audience that respects intelligence, preparation, and long-term thinking, the same mindset required to build and scale modern computing and AI platforms,”
In fact, its cerebral quotient has turned out to be a USP as franchises have gone on selling chess’s niche appeal to sponsors. For trading platform Fyers, which came on board as the principal partner of American Gambits, “it’s a great brand fit because most of the people who trade would also be similar to those who play chess”, says Prachura.
For title sponsors Tech Mahindra, says CEO Mohit Joshi, the tournament brings its scale-at-speed promise to life by showing how platform thinking and ecosystem partnerships can transform a legacy sport into a modern, data-driven global experience. “It mirrors the way we work with enterprises to build connected, scalable, and enduring ecosystems,” he says.
With the third season becoming a roaring success, FIDE has already blocked the window for the next to be scheduled between September 2 and 13. But its president Dvorkovich feels the league shouldn’t restrict its activities to a fortnight-long window. “It should have year-long activities, it should have more or less stable teams so that fans can cultivate a familiarity. And I think we need a few more teams,” he says. It’s a sentiment shared by team owners as well, as Prachura feels GCL should aim to have a cohort of 10 in the next five years.
In his early years, Anand was once met with scepticism when he told a co-traveller he played chess for a living. “That’s not possible,” he was told, “unless you are Viswanathan Anand.” As leagues like the GCL pull the game out of its niche, that statement will soon be a thing of the past.
First Published: Feb 09, 2026, 13:07
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