IM Anuj Shrivatri of Madhya Pradesh won the 7th ASEAN Plus Individual Open Chess Championship in Ozamiz City, Philippines, and earned the grandmaster title. With this, India gained its 100th grandmaster. He had already become an International Master in 2020, at the age of 16, and it has taken him six years to get to the GM title.
In Ozamiz Anuj lost his first-round game, but then scored seven points from the remaining eight rounds, finishing on 7/9. His rating performance was 2586 [Photo ChessBase India].
How long did India take to get from one to 100? Nearly 39 years. Viswanathan Anand became India’s first grandmaster in 1988 [image from Upstep Academy]. He went on to hold the position of strongest Indian player for three and a half decades. That stands as one of the most dominant eras of national sports leadership in history.
Anand is from Chennai in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. If we have counted right, of the current bevy of 100 Indian grandmasters almost 40 of them are from that state. You can find a list of all of them on this Wikipedia page.
It might interest you to learn that the eleven-year-old British super-talent, IM Bodhana Sivanandan, who was born in born in Watford, England, is of south-Indian origin.
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