His father almost ended his career at ten. A cement company saved it. Now the Adani Group, Indian Oil and ITC pay him Rs 5 to 7 crore a year to sit at a board that costs $200,000 just to prepare for. This is the story of how one boy from Padi, Chennai, made the money follow him, and dragged Indian chess out of the shadows with it.
In the summer of 2016, Rameshbabu sat his wife down in their modest home in Padi, a northern suburb of Chennai and told her something that no parent of a gifted child wants to say. They were going to stop their son’s chess career.
The boy was 10 years old. He had already won an Asian Under-8 title in Sri Lanka and was solving fifty complex positions a day. But the math was cruel. Rameshbabu earned a modest salary as a cooperative bank branch manager.
His daughter Vaishali was also a prodigy. The coaching fees, the tournament entries, the bus fares, and the occasional flight had consumed everything. Rameshbabu had contracted polio in childhood. He could not walk properly, let alone travel abroad to watch his children play.
His wife Nagalakshmi had been managing the gruelling commutes alone, walking a kilometre to catch a two-hour public bus to the coach’s home, carrying two children who were too young to understand why their mother looked so tired. The family had reached its limit. It was not a debate. It was a verdict.
Eight years later, that same boy signed a long-term deal with the Adani Group under its “Garv Hai” initiative. His annual income is now estimated at Rs 5 to 7 crore. His commercial portfolio is managed by Rhiti Sports, which signed him to a five-year talent agreement in June 2022.
He has fronted campaigns for ITC Classmate and Indian Oil Corporation. And his face is the one that corporations now associate with Indian chess when they open their marketing budgets.
This is not just a story about a prodigy. It is a story about how one prodigy changed the economics of an entire sport in India.
When a father almost ended a World Champion
The story began with a television set. Vaishali, the elder sibling, was addicted to cartoon channels. Her parents enrolled her in chess, drawing, and yoga classes to pull her away from the screen. The chessboard worked. But it created a new problem.
Her younger brother, barely two years old, would crawl across the floor and disrupt the sessions. He played with the pieces as toys. To restore peace, the family hired Thiyagrajan, a local coach, to visit their home. The toddler had an attention span of fifteen minutes.
After fifteen minutes of instruction, he would run into the hall to play with a ball. Thiyagrajan would give him photocopied sheets of complex positions as homework, promising toy cars if he completed them. The child solved up to fifty positions in a single sitting. He wanted the cars.
By 7, Praggnanandhaa had won his first national title. That earned him a spot at the Asian Under-8 Championship in Sri Lanka. Because he placed first in the nationals, his flight was funded. It was the first time the family had travelled by air. Both siblings won gold medals. The success brought joy. It also brought a growing financial crisis.
To save money, Nagalakshmi walked one kilometer with the children and then endured a two-hour public bus journey to reach their coach’s home. Later, when they moved to R.B. Ramesh’s Chess Gurukul academy, she managed a one-hour commute by shared auto-rickshaw.
She did not know how to play chess. She often said the pieces looked identical to her. But she knew schedules, diets, and hotel kitchens. She would carry raw rice and basic cooking utensils from Chennai to prepare familiar meals in western hotel rooms. This kept her children healthy and saved money on restaurant bills.
By 2016, the expenses had overwhelmed the single bank salary. The parents resolved to halt Praggnanandhaa’s chess career entirely to focus their remaining resources on Vaishali. Before they could act, the boy broke Judit Polgar’s twenty-seven-year-old record.
At 10 years, 10 months, and 19 days, he became the youngest International Master in history. The Ramco Group stepped in with a long-term sponsorship that underwrote his travel. The family could breathe again.
That record did not just save a boy’s career. It proved to Indian corporate India that chess could produce a marketable asset younger than any other sport. Before this, only Viswanathan Anand had managed to secure serious brand endorsements.
Ajimon Francis, managing director at Brand Finance India, described the pre-Praggnanandhaa era with unusual directness. “Apart from Vishy, nobody in chess has come close to getting brand endorsements.” The boy from Padi changed that equation.
The face that opened the corporate wallet
For decades, Indian chess existed in commercial isolation. Grandmasters struggled to cover basic training and travel costs. What the audience needed that was someone to watch at the highest level. Praggnanandhaa became that face.
His competitive rise, his Grandmaster title at 12 years, 10 months, and 13 days, making him the fifth-youngest in history, and his peak rating of 2785 gave brands something they could invest in.
Education-focused parents, seeing chess as a productive blend of cognitive development and competitive play, began enrolling their children in academies. For corporate brands, this shift created what marketers now call the “smart-kid halo.”
Advertisers in banking, financial services, education technology, and consumer goods began viewing chess Grandmasters as highly trusted, low-risk brand ambassadors.
The first major beneficiary was Praggnanandhaa himself. In January 2024, he signed with the Adani Group. This partnership provided the financial security for him to construct a dedicated, high-performance training team, including elite coaches, seconds, and physical therapists.
He and his sister Vaishali fronted the ITC Classmate “EduGames” campaign, which positioned stationery products as tools for intellectual champions. Indian Oil Corporation signed him to a tenure-based contract, aligning the state-run enterprise with the rising national prestige of Indian chess.
The rate card that now exists for Indian chess players was built around the benchmark he set. A top-tier Grandmaster like Dommaraju Gukesh commands a standard annual partnership rate of Rs 1 to 2 crore, with individual social media reels fetching Rs 3 to 6 lakh.
Praggnanandhaa sits in the same annual bracket, though his reels command Rs 1.5 to 3 lakh. Divya Deshmukh, the women’s prodigy from Nagpur, is estimated to earn Rs 40 to 70 lakh annually, with reels at Rs 2 to 4 lakh. Even a mid-ranked Grandmaster can pull in Rs 10 to 25 lakh a year.
These numbers did not exist five years ago. And they did not appear because the market woke up one morning and decided chess was cool. They appeared because a boy from Chennai kept breaking records, and brands needed a way to buy into the story he was writing.
The $200,000 Weapon: What the money actually buys
Praggnanandhaa knows exactly what his sponsorship pays for. “Chess training may look easy and cheap,” he has said, “but it’s a very expensive sport due to all the travel and paraphernalia.”
Modern chess at the Grandmaster level is an athletic endeavour. A 14-round classical tournament like the Candidates demands five-to-six-hour games. To maintain peak physical conditioning, Praggnanandhaa plays badminton and beach volleyball. His preparation has evolved far beyond the board.
It has evolved into a computational arms race. To prepare opening strategies and analyze positions, elite players rely on chess engines like Stockfish and Leela Chess Zero. To find novel tactical paths that survive elite competition, a player needs engines running at one billion nodes per second.
A physical home server capable of matching these speeds costs approximately $200,000 in upfront capital, plus specialized cooling and technical support. This has created a technological divide between sponsored players and self-funded talent.
The pivot has been toward cloud computing. Subscription-based platforms like Chessify lease high-performance server arrays. An elite cloud package offering one billion nodes per second costs around $20,000 per year for five hundred hours of use.
At the grassroots level, a child might practice on a laptop that processes five to twenty thousand kilonodes per second, a machine costing about $1,000. An amateur cloud plan costs $7.99 a month. A master cloud plan runs at $34.99 a month. The gap is staggering.
Corporate sponsorship in chess is not primarily about logos on clothing. It funds the server time that makes a player competitive in the first place. Without the Adani Group’s backing, Praggnanandhaa would not have the infrastructure to compete at the elite level. The money does not just reward talent. It creates the conditions for talent to exist.
The sibling equation: A family as a brand
The commercial value of Praggnanandhaa is inseparable from the person who rides the bus with him. Nagalakshmi still travels with her children to tournaments worldwide, managing their logistics, shielding them from financial stress, and carrying raw rice to cook hot, familiar meals in hotel rooms. She still cannot distinguish a rook from a knight.
Meanwhile, Rameshbabu remains in Chennai, managing the family’s ticketing and domestic logistics from afar. Due to travel costs and physical limitations, he has never been able to watch his children compete live outside Chennai. He follows them on television, on his phone, in the newspapers.
Yet his children have gone on to make chess history. Vaishali and Praggnanandhaa became the first brother-sister duo to earn Grandmaster titles and qualify for the Candidates Tournament.
Their shared home training environment allowed them to challenge and support each other’s growth. This creates a highly compelling, relatable narrative that amplifies their commercial value as a duo. The ITC Classmate campaign understood this. Brands now sell not just a prodigy, but a family.
The market that followed
Once Praggnanandhaa proved that a Chennai prodigy could command Rs 5 crore a year, the rest of the market began to move. The evidence is now visible across the Indian chess ecosystem.
The Global Chess League, a joint venture between Tech Mahindra and FIDE, brought franchise-based team chess to India with six corporate-owned franchises.
The league has drawn over ten million viewers across streaming platforms and accumulated more than one billion social media impressions. Its seasonal sponsorship intake sits at Rs 3 to 4 crore.
These are not coincidences. They are the trailing indicators of a market that found its first commercially viable Indian star outside of Anand. Praggnanandhaa did not just win games. He proved that the investment could pay off.
The man watching from Chennai
Anand Mahindra, Chairman of the Mahindra Group, offered a view on sports growth that reads differently when placed against everything that came before it. “You do not grow a sport by amplifying its volume,” he said. “You grow it by creating a stronger emotional bond with audience and fans.”
The bond in Indian chess was not created by a franchise deal or a corporate initiative. It was assembled over a decade by a bank manager who could not travel, a mother who packed rice in her carry-on, a comedian who treated the game as entertainment, and a coach who paid a toddler in toy cars.
The commercial architecture arrived afterward. It found a structure already standing.
Rameshbabu still has not watched his children compete outside Chennai. He follows their results from the same house in Padi where, a long time ago, a two-year-old picked up chess pieces off the floor because his sister was using them, and could not be persuaded to put them down.