How Samay Raina provoked Anand Mahindra into starting Global Chess League

Anand Mahindra said a 2020 challenge from Samay Raina set the Global Chess League in motion. His remarks underscored how the league's growth rests on the human drama that keeps chess compelling.

In Short

• Samay Raina challenged Mahindra to start a global chess league
• FIDE president Arkady Dvorkovich later contacted Mahindra and progressed the idea
• Five-time world champion Viswanathan Anand also joined the project

Industrialist Anand Mahindra has revealed how a challenge from comedian Samay Raina eventually led to the creation of the Global Chess League, a project he jokingly describes as the “most expensive joke” ever played on him.

Raina had challenged Mahindra during an online interaction in 2020 to start a global chess league. Mahindra took him seriously, setting in motion a series of conversations that eventually brought FIDE president Arkady Dvorkovich and five-time world champion Viswanathan Anand into the project.

“Usually, comedians provoke laughter but Samay in a way provoked a global chess league,” Business Line reported Mahindra as saying at the fourth season of the Global Chess League in Bengaluru.

Mahindra explained that he had been watching Raina and chess commentator Sagar Shah stream the 2020 Chess Olympiad when he noticed the growing interest around their broadcast.

“I saw that in every 15 minutes the crowd of people watching grew larger,” he recalled.

FROM A JOKE TO A GLOBAL LEAGUE

The idea soon moved beyond a conversation between Mahindra and Raina. FIDE president Arkady Dvorkovich contacted Mahindra to find out whether he was serious about creating a league. Mahindra was, and discussions followed over the next few months.

Five-time world champion Viswanathan Anand subsequently joined the project, giving the proposed league the backing of one of the biggest names in chess.

The Global Chess League eventually took shape as a franchise-based team competition, bringing some of the world's leading players together in a format designed to make chess more accessible to a wider audience. Unlike traditional individual chess tournaments, the league puts players into teams, with franchises competing across a season.

The competition features six franchises and has attracted several of the biggest names in the sport. Since its launch, the league has travelled across international and Indian venues, with editions held in Dubai, London, Mumbai and Bengaluru.

Four seasons in, the project has grown well beyond the idea Raina threw at Mahindra in 2020. The league now has an annual prize purse of $1 million, while its projected five-year business value is expected to exceed $40 million.

Mahindra jokingly described the project as the result of the “most expensive joke” played on him.

“If it is a joke then it’s the most expensive joke anyone has ever played on me,” he said.

Mahindra, however, has no regrets about taking Raina's challenge seriously.

“I’m in fact enjoying the fruits of the success of that expense and effort,” he added.

ANAND MAHINDRA'S RERLATIONSHIP WITH CHESS

Mahindra's own relationship with chess remains rather more modest. He admitted that he continues to struggle against chess bots on Chess.com and is often mocked for his mistakes.

But those losses have also shaped his view of what makes chess compelling.

Mahindra believes the appeal of the sport lies not in the pursuit of perfect moves, but in the human element behind them. With artificial intelligence increasingly capable of finding the best moves on the board, he argued that it is still the mistakes, pressure and unpredictability of human players that keep audiences invested.

“We gather not to watch machines play. We gather to watch human beings play,” Mahindra said. “A machine can tell us what the best move is but it’s only people who make us care about it.”

And that, perhaps, is what turned a comedian's challenge into something far more serious: a league built around the idea that chess is ultimately about the people playing it.

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