🇮🇳 Yuzvendra Chahal

He was born in Jind, Haryana, in July 1990, to K. K. Chahal, an advocate, and Sunita, a homemaker. He learned to read at four and to play chess at seven. He won the national under-12 title in 2002 and represented India at the Asian Youth Chess Championships in Iran. The family ran low on funds for the chess tour circuit when Yuzvendra was a teenager, and he switched, with his father's encouragement, to cricket — a sport which, in Jind's logic, was at least televised.

He played for Haryana Under-14, then Under-16, then made his Ranji Trophy debut for the state in early 2009. He moved to Mumbai for first-class cricket in 2011 after Haryana left him out of the side, and then in 2014 made the IPL leap that defined his career — Royal Challengers Bangalore signed him for the season, where Virat Kohli's captaincy turned him into a powerplay bowler in a format that, at the time, did not let leg-spinners bowl in the powerplay.

His India debut came in June 2016 in a T20I against Zimbabwe at Harare. By February 2017, in a T20I at Bangalore against England, he had taken 6 for 25 — at the time among the best bowling figures in men's T20I history. He took 6 for 42 against Australia at Melbourne in 2019, a remarkable ODI return on Australian soil, and his short-armed wrong'un became the ball most often missed in modern white-ball cricket.

He is, by 2026, India's all-time leading wicket-taker in T20I cricket, and his economy in T20Is is below 8 across more than seventy matches, a remarkable figure for a leg-spinner in the modern T20 era. He has played in multiple T20 World Cups and the 2019 ODI World Cup in England.

The IPL is where he became, depending on which dressing room you ask, the most dangerous middle-overs spinner in the league's history or merely its most consistent. He played for Royal Challengers Bangalore from 2014 to 2021, then was bought by Rajasthan Royals for 6.5 crore in 2022, where he won the Purple Cap with 27 wickets in his first season — the only leg-spinner to win the award.

He married the content creator Dhanashree Verma in December 2020 in Gurugram. They announced their separation in 2025; he has spoken about the period, very briefly, only to say that he was learning to live alone again. He is, off the field, a YouTube commentator, an unfailingly enthusiastic chess streamer, and the only Indian cricketer who has shared a chess board with both Viswanathan Anand and Magnus Carlsen during the COVID lockdown stream series of 2020.

Test cricket has been the great absence. He has, by 2026, played a single Test match — against South Africa at Cape Town in January 2022, when he was an 11th-hour pitch-call inclusion — and has been ignored by every Indian selection committee since. The omission has been a long, public sore point. He has said, more than once, that he does not understand it. Ravi Shastri said in 2021 that Chahal would have taken 200 Test wickets if India had picked him. The selectors disagreed. The argument continues.

What he has, instead, is a record that belongs to no other Indian leg-spinner: more T20I wickets than anyone in his country's history, a six-for in T20I cricket, and a generation of younger wrist-spinners — Rahul Chahar, Ravi Bishnoi, Mayank Markande — who learned the format watching him bowl in IPL middle overs from 2014 onwards. He has played in five IPL franchises by 2026. He has not missed an IPL season since his debut. The chess habit, by his own description, is still the bedrock: every match he plays a quick blitz on his phone before walking out to the boundary.