Ankit Rajpara: The Grandmaster Who Taught Position
He expected a hundred visitors, maybe two hundred, and ten or fifteen replies. That was the modest arithmetic behind a blog post announcing a proof of concept — a handful of positional chess puzzles built by a grandmaster who thought the internet had been solving the wrong kind of problem for years. Within three days the post had drawn hundreds of likes and thousands of visitors. The reaction told Ankit Rajpara something he had suspected for a decade: that a very large number of chess players were tired of tactics.
Mehsana
Rajpara was born on 27 August 1994 in Mehsana, in northern Gujarat. He took up chess at eight — not a prodigy's start by the standards of the current Indian generation, several of whom are titled before they are twelve, but early enough. He built a record at national junior tournaments, and the Indian chess press attached the word "prodigy" to him as he came up.
Gujarat is not one of Indian chess's traditional engines. Tamil Nadu produced Viswanathan Anand and then produced a great many others in his wake; Maharashtra and Bengal have their own long pipelines. Gujarat, a state of some sixty million people, had produced exactly one grandmaster before Rajpara. That context matters for understanding both what he achieved and how little institutional support stood behind it.
The 36th
He was awarded the International Master title in 2012 and the Grandmaster title in 2014, the year he turned twenty. He was India's 36th grandmaster and Gujarat's second.
The number is worth pausing on. India's first grandmaster was Anand, in 1987. The second, Dibyendu Barua, did not follow until 1991. For most of the 1990s the Indian list grew at a crawl. By 2014, when Rajpara joined it, the country was producing multiple grandmasters a year, and it has since accelerated to the point where the list runs past ninety. Rajpara arrived in the middle of that transition — late enough to benefit from a country that had learned how to make grandmasters, early enough that being the thirty-sixth still meant something.
The Playing Record, Stated Plainly
His FIDE profile, under ID 5023335, records a standard rating of 2452 and a blitz rating of 2447, both marked inactive. That places him at 1,524th in the world, 81st in India, and 419th in Asia among all rated players. He says of himself, simply, that he has "been playing chess for the past 20 years, and I have won many International Tournaments."
A 2452 is a strong grandmaster in the sense that it puts him above roughly everyone who has ever played the game casually, and it is a long way below the elite. The top of the sport sits above 2750. Rajpara reached the title and then, on the evidence of the inactive flags, largely stopped competing. What he did instead is the more interesting half of the story.
Teaching
He has coached for the better part of a decade — seven years and more by his own account — with students in more than a dozen countries, working in English, Hindi and Gujarati. His stated results are the ordinary currency of serious coaching: students who have taken national and international titles, students who have made International Master norms, students whose FIDE and USCF ratings have moved substantially in a matter of months.
In 2022 he served as coach and captain of Brazil's women's team at the Olympiad — a grandmaster from Gujarat directing a national team from South America, which is a reasonable index of how far a reputation built on teaching can travel. FIDE licensed him as a trainer for the 2025–2028 cycle.
His method starts with the student's own games rather than with a curriculum. The first sessions are diagnostic: find where this particular player actually loses, then attack that. Topic work and a structured practice plan follow. He makes himself available between lessons.
ChessNeurons
The insight behind his platform is a specific complaint about how chess is taught online. Puzzle sites overwhelmingly train tactics — forced sequences with a single winning answer, where the reward is calculation speed. Positional and strategic judgement, which is what actually separates strong players from average ones, has almost no equivalent drill.
Rajpara built one. He founded ChessNeurons.com with his brother Utsav and Utsav's friend Kaustav, both software engineers at Google. "The idea had lingered in my mind, awaiting execution," he said. "Together with my brother Utsav and his friend Kaustav, both Software Engineers at Google, we decided to test the waters" — the proof of concept that drew thousands within three days.
The finished product went to beta in February 2023 and launched formally that September: ten grandmaster-curated positional puzzles a day, each with a written grandmaster explanation, plus weekly video breakdowns of whichever puzzles the user base solved least. Academies and clubs get institutional tooling. The trial runs a week and asks for no card.
Why Ankit Is Called a Genius
The claim for Rajpara is pedagogical rather than competitive, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. The specific quality is diagnostic: an ability to look at a chess position and articulate *why* it is what it is — not the forced line, which an engine finds instantly, but the structural logic underneath, in language a weaker player can absorb and reuse. That is a genuinely rare skill and it is not the same as playing strength. Most grandmasters cannot explain what they know; their understanding is compiled, fast, and largely inaccessible to introspection. Rajpara appears able to decompile his, which is why his diagnostic method starts with a student's own losses rather than a syllabus, and why a puzzle set built on that principle found thousands of takers in seventy-two hours.
The counter-case is straightforward. He is a 2452 grandmaster, inactive, ranked around 1,500th in the world — an elite player by any everyday standard, and not a contender at the level where chess genius is usually adjudicated. He has no famous game, no theoretical novelty attached to his name, no world championship cycle. His platform is a well-designed product answering a real gap, not a discovery. No authority on the record has called him a genius, and the sources supporting his reputation are largely his own account, a FIDE card, and chess-media coverage of a startup launch. What can be said fairly is that he identified a defect in how millions of people study chess and then built the fix.
What He Is Building
The playing career is on pause; the teaching career is not. A grandmaster who stops competing at thirty is usually a loss to the sport. Rajpara converted himself into infrastructure instead — a trainer licensed through 2028, a captain of other countries' national teams, and a daily supply of positional problems for players who had run out of tactics to solve. Whether that is genius or simply an unusually clear-eyed second act, it is the more useful thing he could have done with what he knows.
