Anuj Shrivatri stared down the board in the Philippines and delivered the move India had awaited for months. By clinching the 7th ASEAN Plus Individual Open Chess Championship on Sunday, the 22-year-old from Katni officially crossed the threshold as India’s 100th Grandmaster. He is the first player from Madhya Pradesh to ever earn the title. The milestone arrived far from home, roughly 2,800 miles away, while his family celebrated Diwali back in central India.
He had chased the required Grandmaster norms through years of agonizing heartbreak. Four or five times, the final norm slipped from his grasp in the closing rounds of international opens. "The feeling right now is mostly relief," Shrivatri said, preparing to board his flight back home. "I had been trying for the GM title for a long time. There were so many times my GM norms were missed. At least four or five times I was really close, and it slipped away. So now that the title is finally complete, I'm feeling a lot of relief."
His parents—railway teacher Ashok Kumar Shrivatri and government school teacher Manorama Shrivatri—weathered every single stalled tournament beside him. His father first placed wooden pieces in front of him at age five. While his elder brother eventually traded the board for a software engineering career in Bengaluru, Shrivatri stayed glued to the squares. He climbed through local coaching stables under Virendra Tiwari, Nikhilesh Jain, and Yashpal Arora before coach Rajesh Bahadur guided him to the International Master title in 2019. Then the pandemic struck. Uncertainty crept in, prompting him to park his competitive ambitions and finish a computer science degree at Lovely Professional University.
A full-time corporate job offer landed in his inbox the moment his college internship wrapped up. He rejected it. Chess demanded total commitment, even if it lacked financial backing. Without corporate sponsors, Shrivatri funded every overseas campaign out of his own pocket. He stacked cash by dominating rapid tournaments across India and taking coaching assignments on the side, funneling every rupee into flights and tournament entry fees. A single foreign outing routinely bled ₹1 lakh, making entry into elite 2600-plus rating tournaments in Qatar or Kazakhstan a dangerous financial bet.
Shrivatri also had to summon raw tactical discipline after crashing to defeat in Round 1 in the Philippines, having pushed too aggressively with the black pieces. He scrapped the reckless setups immediately. Shrivatri locked down his lines, waited out opponent blunders, and stitched together an eight-game unbeaten streak to seize the championship. Having trained alongside Grandmasters Vishnu Prasanna, Swayams Mishra, and Swapnil Dhopade, Shrivatri now sets his sights on breaking into the 2600 Elo barrier.