Anuj Shrivatri did not learn chess in a fancy academy. His first lesson happened around 2010, at a sawmill in Katni, Madhya Pradesh, where his father had taken him and his elder brother to meet a coach who did not teach just anyone. Sixteen years later, that boy from Katni has put his town on the chess map for good.
On Sunday, November 8, Shrivatri won the 7th ASEAN Plus Individual Open Chess Championship in Ozamiz City, Philippines, and became India’s 100th Grandmaster. He is the first Grandmaster Madhya Pradesh has ever produced.
## The road to India’s 100th Grandmaster
It did not start well. Shrivatri lost his opening game to home player Arca Karlo, and at that point the title looked like someone else’s problem. Then he did what champions in this sport do. He stopped losing.
Seven points from nine rounds. He won his last two games with everything on the line and finished half a point clear of Vietnam’s Nguyen Duc Hoa, with Nouri Alekhine of the Philippines third on six points. The fourth seed, rated 2450, played at a performance rating of **2586**, according to The Times of India.
That recovery is the story. Anyone can win a tournament from the front. Winning one after losing round one, in a foreign country, with the 100th Grandmaster tag hanging over every move, takes a different kind of nerve.
## A title with an asterisk, and why it still counts
Here is the part worth getting right, because it will come up. Shrivatri did not take the usual route to the title. The ASEAN Plus event carries a FIDE-approved direct title: win it, and the Grandmaster title is yours, provided at least four Grandmasters and six International Masters play every round. His rating of 2450 sits below the 2500 mark the standard route demands, and he did not have to collect three norms across 27 games.
So there are two ways to read this. The strict reading says the shortcut matters, and the title came through a side door. The other reading says he still had to win a nine-round international tournament after an opening-round defeat, against a field strong enough to qualify for the direct title in the first place. Both readings are honest. But only one of them decides what happens next, and it is this: from here on, Shrivatri has to defend the title the ordinary way, one rating point at a time, against players who will test him precisely because of how he got it. That is a fair deal, and he will know it better than anyone.
## What 100 actually means
India’s first Grandmaster was Viswanathan Anand, who completed his final norm in Coimbatore on December 28, 1987. It took nearly four decades to reach 100, and the pace has changed completely. VS Rathanvel became the 99th only in July this year, at the Guwahati Smart City International Open, and S Aswath was the 98th in the same month.
The numbers tell the rest. Tamil Nadu accounts for **38** of India’s 100 Grandmasters, according to data compiled by The Hindu from FIDE and the All India Chess Federation. India had 44 Grandmasters in 2016. Ten years later, the count is 100. That is **56** new Grandmasters in a decade, and the pipeline behind them is wider still.
Anand himself congratulated Shrivatri, calling the milestone “a cracker of a 100”. AICF president Nitin Narang went further on X, writing “GRANDMASTER No. 100 FOR BHARAT!” and adding, “Onwards to 200 Grandmasters!”
## He quit his job for this
Shrivatri’s path was not the usual academy-to-arena story. He earned a B.Tech from Lovely Professional University in Punjab, then took a work-from-home job with a German company. In 2024, he quit it to focus only on chess. He had been an International Master since 2019, the youngest from his state, and he had spent years as one of the names tipped to become the 100th. The tag followed him around. On Sunday, he finally wore it.
There is a small detail in all this that says more about Indian chess than any statistic. His first coach was met at a sawmill. Not a school programme, not a city club. A sawmill in Katni. The sport in India now runs on that kind of beginning, in towns nobody associates with chess, and the results keep arriving from exactly those places.
It has been quite a week for Indian sport, in fact. [India’s four-run rain win over New Zealand in Wellington](https://auindia.in/sports/india-vs-new-zealand-2nd-odi-rain-win) put the ODI series at 2-0, and [Mohammed Shami announced his retirement from Test cricket](https://auindia.in/sports/mohammed-shami-retires-test-cricket) on the same weekend. Shrivatri’s milestone belongs in that company, even if it arrived without a stadium or a television camera.
The question now is not whether India reaches 200 Grandmasters. Narang has already said it out loud, and the numbers make it a matter of when. The question is where the next ones come from. If the 100th came from a sawmill in Katni, the 101st could come from anywhere. That is the whole point.