B. Adhiban: The Man Who Attacked Everyone
In January 2017, at the Tata Steel Masters in Wijk aan Zee, an Indian grandmaster who had qualified out of the second-tier group the year before finished third with 7.5 out of 13. On the way he beat Sergey Karjakin, who had come within a tiebreak of the world title two months earlier, and Dmitry Andreikin, and Richard Rapport, and Radoslaw Wojtaszek. It was the sort of fortnight that rearranges a career, and it belonged to a player almost nobody had picked.
The Junior Who Won Everything
Adhiban Baskaran was born on 15 August 1992, on India's Independence Day. His junior record reads like a checklist someone forgot to interrupt. In 2007 he won the Asian under-16 championship in Tashkent. Across 2007 and 2008 he played first board for Indian teams that took gold at the Under-16 Chess Olympiad — not merely a member of winning sides but the player carrying the top board on both. In 2008 he became World Under-16 Champion. By 2009, still a teenager, he was Indian Chess Champion outright, beating a field of adults who had been professionals since before he could read a scoresheet.
Wijk aan Zee, First Contact
The Dutch coastal village of Wijk aan Zee runs a tournament with three tiers, and Adhiban climbed all of them the slow way. In 2011 he won the Cultural Village event, the bottom rung. In 2012 he tied for third and fourth in the Tata Steel C group with Daan Brandenburg on 8.5 out of 13. In 2016 he shared first in the Challengers with 9 out of 13 in a three-way tie, beating Alexei Dreev and Eltaj Safarli along the way, which earned him the promotion to the Masters that he would convert so spectacularly a year later. Almost no one ascends that ladder rung by rung. Most players either arrive in the Masters or never do.
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Before Wijk aan Zee made him respectable, knockout chess made him dangerous. At the 2013 Chess World Cup he eliminated Evgeny Alekseev, rated 2710, in the first round, then knocked out Alexandr Fier in the second — a sequence that established a reputation he never quite shed, that of a player whose rating badly understated what he could do to you across a board. The same year he won the Sants Open in Barcelona with 8.5 out of 10 in a field containing twenty-three grandmasters and twenty-eight international masters. In 2014 he won the Biel Chess Festival Masters. Not every knockout went his way: at the 2015 World Cup he went out in the first round to Vladimir Fedoseev after rapid tiebreaks.
Board Four and the Bronze Medals
Adhiban's team record is a study in usefulness. At the 41st Chess Olympiad in Tromso in 2014 he scored 7 out of 11 on board four, contributing to India's bronze medal. Eight years later, at the 2022 Olympiad held in Chennai, he was again part of an Indian team that took bronze, this time in front of a home crowd that had begun treating chess players like cricketers. In 2015 he won the Spanish League with the Solvay team. In 2018 he won the Reykjavik Open with 7.5 out of 9 and took the Tournament of Peace in Zagreb, closing out the most productive stretch of his professional life.
Why Adhiban Is Called a Genius
The encyclopedic record does not quote anyone applying the word to him, and a careful reader should notice that absence rather than paper over it. What the record does document is a specific and unusual competitive faculty: Adhiban is at his best precisely when the opposition is strongest, and measurably worse when it is not. The pattern is consistent across a decade. He knocked out a 2710-rated player in a World Cup. He beat four established elite grandmasters inside a single supertournament in 2017, one of them the reigning world championship challenger. Rating theory says a player performs around his number with noise in both directions; Adhiban's noise has a direction, and it points upward against better players. That suggests something real about how he thinks — a willingness to enter unbalanced, sharp positions where the burden of accuracy falls on both sides equally, which is a rational strategy against a stronger opponent and a dangerous one against a weaker one.
The counter-case is not subtle. He has never won a supertournament outright, never played a Candidates Tournament, and has never been the top-rated player in his own country. He is currently the twenty-first highest rated player in India, in a nation whose top ten has been remade by teenagers since his own junior titles. His signature results — Sants, Reykjavik, Biel, the Challengers — are open tournaments and second-tier events, and the 2017 Masters remains a single astonishing fortnight rather than a plateau he held. If genius means sustained superiority, the word does not fit. If it means a mind that produces, on its best days, chess that world-class professionals cannot answer, the 2017 crosstable is the argument, and it is a strong one.
What He Leaves Behind
Adhiban's career is the bridge between two Indian chess eras. He was born into the generation that had to prove Viswanathan Anand was not a fluke, and he is still playing in the one that has produced multiple teenagers in the world's top ten. His junior titles in 2007 and 2008 came at a moment when Indian juniors winning world championships was still remarkable rather than expected, and his Olympiad bronzes in 2014 and 2022 bracket the years in which India became a genuine team power. The players now dismantling elite fields learned, in part, from watching someone with a lower rating walk into Wijk aan Zee and refuse to be intimidated. That refusal was always his real subject.
