Krishnan Sasikiran: India's Indispensable Second Man
In 2013, when Viswanathan Anand defended the world title, one of the grandmasters working in his back room was a man born in the same city, who that same year won the Indian national championship for the fourth time. Krishnan Sasikiran had spent a decade as the second-strongest player in a country with eyes only for its first. Both facts belong in one sentence, because his whole career lives in that space: elite, useful, one rung below the spotlight.
The Boy from Nanganallur
Sasikiran was born on 7 January 1981 in Madras, the Tamil Nadu capital now called Chennai, and completed his education at Modern Senior Secondary School in the city's Nanganallur neighbourhood. Wikipedia's account of him is almost aggressively unsentimental about the early years; it records no origin story, no first chess set, no discovering coach. What it records instead is a result sheet that begins abruptly and never really stops. He is married to Radhika, and they have a daughter.
Nineteen Ninety-Nine and After
The breakout year was 1999. Sasikiran won the Indian Chess Championship for the first time and took the Asian Junior Chess Championship in Vung Tau, Vietnam, announcing himself as more than a domestic talent. In 2000 he completed the requirements for the grandmaster title at the Commonwealth Championship. In 2001 he won Hastings, the oldest and most storied of the English winter tournaments, a result that put an Indian name on a trophy previously handled mostly by Europeans and Soviets. Then came a two-year burst: national champion again in 2002 and 2003, winner of the fourth Asian Individual Championship in 2003, winner of the Politiken Cup in Copenhagen the same year. The Arjuna Award, India's honour for outstanding sporting achievement, arrived in 2002, along with a cheque for twenty lakh rupees from the Tamil Nadu government.
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What followed was the hardest phase of a chess career: converting national dominance into international standing. In 2005 he tied for first with Jan Timman at the Sigeman and Co tournament, split between Malmo and Copenhagen. In 2006 he tied for first at the Aeroflot Open in Moscow alongside Baadur Jobava, Victor Bologan and Shakhriyar Mamedyarov, finishing third on tiebreak in what was then the most brutally competitive open event in the world. That year he also took team gold at the Asian Games. The January 2007 FIDE list showed him at 2700 Elo and ranked twenty-first in the world, making him only the second Indian player ever to cross the 2700 threshold. His peak ranking, number 21, dates to April 2006; his peak rating, 2720, came later, in May 2012. In December 2008 he won the City of Pamplona tournament, a category sixteen event, with a rating performance of 2795 — the single most emphatic number of his career.
The Team Player
Sasikiran's reputation among professionals rests as heavily on what he did for others as on what he won alone. He was one of Anand's seconds at the 2013 World Chess Championship, a role that demands a player capable of finding ideas he will never be credited for. At the 2014 Chess Olympiad in Tromso he scored 7.5 out of 10 on board three, helping India to the team bronze and taking individual silver for his board. He kept winning across formats: the Asian Blitz Championship in Mashhad in 2011, on tiebreak over Wesley So and Bu Xiangzhi; clear first in the open section of the 15th Corsican Circuit that same year; a run to the Corsica Masters knockout semi-final, where he lost to Anand himself. In 2009 he tied for second and third with Etienne Bacrot in Antwerp.
A Second Career by Post
Most grandmasters treat correspondence chess as a curiosity. Sasikiran treated it as a discipline. He earned the correspondence International Master title in 2015 and the Senior International Master title in 2016, fulfilling the norms at the Marian Vinchev Memorial and the Palciauskas Invitational. It is a form of the game where engines are permitted, clocks run in days, and the only edge available is the quality of a human being's judgment about which computer line is actually worth playing. He was good at that too.
Why Krishnan Is Called a Genius
The honest answer begins with a caveat: the encyclopedic record of Sasikiran contains no one calling him a genius, no quoted verdict from a rival, no famous phrase attached to his name. The case has to be built from evidence rather than testimony, and the evidence points to a specific and unglamorous kind of intelligence — generality. He won the Indian championship in 1999 and again in 2013, fourteen years apart, a span over which most players' calculation degrades. He won a category sixteen closed tournament with a 2795 performance, an Asian blitz title decided in seconds per move, and correspondence titles decided over months. Those three formats reward almost opposite faculties: nerve, pattern recall, and patient verification. Very few players are excellent at all three, and the ability to be excellent at all three is a real cognitive fact about him, not a compliment.
The counter-case is equally real and should not be softened. Sasikiran never played a Candidates Tournament, never won a supertournament outright against the world's top ten, and peaked at world number 21 — extremely strong, but a tier below the players who define eras. His rating has since fallen to 2538, as of December 2025, from a high of 2720. If the word genius is reserved for people who changed how the game is understood, he does not qualify. If it is used for a mind that solved the game repeatedly, across formats and across two decades, in a country that gave him almost no institutional runway, the word is defensible. Craft, not revelation, is the honest description.
What He Leaves Behind
Sasikiran belongs to the generation of Indian players who had to prove that Anand was not an accident. Four national titles, Hastings, the Asian Individual crown, an Olympiad medal on a top board and a place in the 2700 club made him living proof that the country's chess depth was structural rather than freakish. The teenagers who now populate the world's top twenty grew up in a system he helped make plausible. He was rarely the story. He was frequently the reason there was one.
