🇮🇳Mitrabha
Guha

Novi Sad, Serbia, November 2021. The GM Third Saturday Mix 220 tournament is approaching its final rounds. Mitrabha Guha, a twenty-year-old from Kolkata, is playing his penultimate round against GM Nikola Sedlak. He needs a win. He gets one. The victory completes his final Grandmaster norm and pushes his FIDE rating above the required threshold. India's 72nd Grandmaster has been made. West Bengal has its ninth chess grandmaster. And in Kolkata — a city that has always taken chess seriously — one more young man has done what the great players of Bengali chess once did: reached the highest title the game offers.

Chess in Bengal has deep roots. Dibyendu Barua — one of India's earliest grandmasters — is from Kolkata. Surya Shekhar Ganguly, another Bengal grandmaster and multiple Indian national champion, is from the same city. The chess culture of West Bengal operates with an intensity and history that makes it distinct even within India's chess-rich landscape. When Mitrabha Guha began playing chess in 2005, he entered a lineage of serious competitive practice that stretched back decades. And the figures who would later mentor him — Barua, Ganguly, and Deepan Chakkravarthy J. — were among the most accomplished chess minds India had produced.

His father, Subrata Guha, is himself a recognized chess player — which meant that chess in the Guha household was not merely encouraged but understood at a deep level. Competitive chess was a family language before it was a professional pursuit. By the time Mitrabha was earning his International Master title in 2018, he was already playing chess of a quality that his coaches and contemporaries recognized as destined for the GM title. The question was not whether he would reach it, but when.

His final GM norm came at Novi Sad after norms accumulated across European tournaments — the standard pathway for Indian grandmasters who must prove their strength against international competition far from home. The third norm, secured by defeating Sedlak in the penultimate round, was a moment of decisive precision: he needed the win, he calculated the position correctly, and he took it. That ability — to perform when performance is required — had been developing since his earliest junior years in Kolkata.

The Commonwealth Rapid Gold Medal was a historic achievement: the first time any player had won the Commonwealth title in the rapid format. Rapid chess — with thirty minutes or less per side — demands a different kind of preparation than classical chess. It rewards pattern recognition, intuition built through thousands of games, and the composure to make quick decisions without the luxury of long calculation. Mitrabha's rapid strength was evident, and the Commonwealth gold confirmed it at the continental level. He was not simply India's 72nd GM. He was its fastest-improving one in rapid play.

The year 2025 brought the National Blitz Championship — one of India's most competitive domestic titles in a format where the country's deepest pool of grandmasters compete for supremacy under rapid time controls. Mitrabha dominated it, winning the title in a field that included players with far more international experience. The victory confirmed that his Commonwealth gold and his 2023 tournament wins were not isolated peaks but evidence of a player whose ceiling had not yet been reached. He appeared in the same year on Kaun Banega Crorepati — India's most-watched quiz show — becoming the first Indian chess grandmaster to compete on the program and winning ₹4,80,000. Chess, for Mitrabha Guha, had made him known far beyond the board.