Anuj Shrivatri becomes India’s 100th chess Grandmaster after ASEAN Plus win in Ozamiz City

Anuj Shrivatri became India’s 100th chess Grandmaster on November 8 after winning the 7th ASEAN Plus Individual Open Chess Championship in Ozamiz City, Philippines. The 22-year-old is the first Grandmaster from Madhya Pradesh.

Shrivatri was born on July 21, 2004, and hails from Katni in Madhya Pradesh; he began playing chess at the age of seven. Early in his career he finished third in the National Under-13 Championship and fourth at the World Youth Under-14 event. Rajesh Bahadur coached him between 2016 and 2019, and Shrivatri later progressed to the International Master level without a regular coach.

He became a FIDE Master in 2018 and earned the International Master title soon after, achieving the IM at the age of 15 years and 31 days—the youngest IM from Madhya Pradesh and Central India at that time. FIDE formally approved his IM title in 2020 after he completed both the final IM norm and the 2400 rating requirement at the Sant Adria tournament in Spain.

Shrivatri has built his record largely in open events. He first attracted wider attention at the 2018 Sitges Open in Spain, where he was tied for second on points but placed third on tiebreaks, and he returned to Sitges in 2019 to tie for fourth with 6.5/9 after losing consecutive games in rounds three and four and scoring 4.5/5 across the final five rounds.

He finished third at the 3rd Gujarat International GM Open in 2022 with 8.5/10, producing a run of six consecutive wins in the closing rounds and earning INR 1.5 lakh. In 2025 he was runner-up at the 2nd Namma Bengaluru GM with 8/10, level on points with Levan Pantsulaia and Alexei Fedorov.

Shrivatri’s 2026 season included victory at the Grandeur 10 Open Rapid Rating tournament in Vadodara on October 10-11, where he finished unbeaten on 8.5/9 and drew with GM Abhimanyu Puranik in the final round; that win was his ninth tournament victory of the year and his eighth within India.

In Ozamiz City he lost his first game but recovered to score 7/8 over the remainder of the event, needing wins in the final two rounds to secure the title; he finished on 7 points from 9 games, half a point ahead of Vietnam’s GM Nguyen Duc Hoa. Shrivatri obtained the Grandmaster title via FIDE’s direct title regulations for outright winners of the ASEAN Plus Open Championship; by the standard route a player must achieve three GM norms and reach a peak FIDE rating of at least 2,500.

All India Chess Federation president Nitin Narang hailed the result as a historic moment for Indian chess as the country entered triple digits in its list of produced Grandmasters. Viswanathan Anand wrote: "Happy Diwali. A cracker of a 100. Congrats to @AnujShrivatri on getting India to this milestone. Funnily only today I was thinking December 2027 will be the 40th anniversary of my GM title and literally this manifested….@FIDE_chess @aicfchess". Ilamparthi A. R. became the country’s 90th in October 2025, making Shrivatri the 10th new Grandmaster since then and taking India to 100 grandmasters in chess.