NEW DELHI: Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, felt like the wait was almost over. Almost a decade after the end of the ten-year Trojan War, he and his crew were finally within reach of home, only to find themselves on the verge of losing all hope of ever returning. “All my comrades were slain, and I alone was left,” says an impoverished Odysseus at one point in Homer’s ancient Greek epic The Odyssey. But, even in his darkest moments of despair and doubt, he never gives up his desire to see Ithaca.Rathanvel VS, like Odysseus, felt as if he was within touching distance of his destiny, the elusive title of Grandmaster (GM) in this case, only to see it slip away again and again. “I could have become a Grand Master four years ago,” he told TimesofIndia.com during an exclusive interview. I did not have to wait for the standards. I collected those with ease. What he waited four and a half years for was a number: 2500. The Elo rating that transforms a standard Grandmaster into a real Grandmaster.On Saturday, in Assam, I finally crossed it.“You know that feeling where you know you’re worthy of it, but somehow you’re still not there,” an elated and perhaps relieved Rathanvel added from Guwahati during his first visit to Northeast India.Now there is no more to wonder. Rathanvel VS is the 99th Grand Master of India.
A chessboard that has been free
There was no great line of chess in the Rathanvel house in Coimbatore. “I had Horlicks or Complan, I don’t remember which, when I was six or seven,” he said. “And they gave us free chess with it, so I started pestering my mom to play with me.”What started as a child beating his mother over a free tip turned, over time, into enrollment in a nearby academy under two local coaches, Krishnamoorthy and Dhansekar, names Rathanvel still attributes true gratitude to.“To this day I am very grateful to him,” he said.The climb that followed was not a straight line. In 2019, he crossed 2400 and took four IM standards at the Abu Dhabi Masters.
In September 2021, at the first Saturday tournament in Hungary, he had his first GM norm, and, remarkably, his second came in the same month, at the Vezerkepzo GM-MIX. A third will follow in 2022.On paper, Rathanvel had done everything a player needs to become a Grandmaster. I just don’t have the rating to go with it.
Stuck on the edge
What followed was less a plan than a cycle. “Whenever I’m like 2496, 2497, I’ll be just one win away, and suddenly too much pressure or something, and I just kind of miss winning games,” Rathanvel revealed.“Once a slide goes through, it just keeps going. I bleed like fifteen, twenty points to a stroke, and then it fixes, it goes back. It was kind of a pattern.“Sometimes it was very depressing. I had sleep loss and a lot of those things related to it.”Injury and circumstance added to the wait. I fractured his hand twice. COVID shut down international travel as momentum was building.College, a degree in mechanical engineering at Hindustan College in Coimbatore, attracted attention during the deals that the 2001-born might otherwise have gone on to pursue assessment.During his hunt for the 2500 mark, the lowest point came in 2025, in a match against David Paravyan in Abu Dhabi.“I knew I was going to win. But somehow, I started doing things wrong, and I knew things were out of control,” he said. “This was actually very heartbreaking. At one point, I even felt that maybe I should probably take a bigger break and then try something else.”I did not Instead, on July 1 of this year, sitting at 2492, I traveled to Assam for two qualifying tournaments.I deliberately entered rounds against lower opposition, players under 1600, and simply did not lose. He has straight wins. Eight Elo points. The number he had been chasing for four and a half years finally clicked.
Lucky, but not so lucky…
“Any chess player, if they are from very rich backgrounds, will not have financial problems. But in general, people who are not from those backgrounds usually have problems,” he told this website.“In this case, I was very lucky. I was offered a sponsorship by MPL, Mobile Premier League. It supported me from 2019 to 2025.”In an event organized by MPL called Chess Mahayudh, Rathanvel played twelve hours non-stop, from 10 am to 10 pm, against a stream of opponents, beating one Grandmaster and taking down five more along the way, ending up with 256 wins from 265 games and the tournament’s top prize of Rs 5 lakh.
However, this support did not survive. The Indian government’s ban on real-money gaming platforms last year hit MPL directly, and the funding that had carried Rathanvel through some of its toughest years ended.Behind that financial lifeline is also a family running their own small business. Her father, Sivakumar, and mother, Senthil Vadivu, run a wedding card printing business in Coimbatore. His younger brother, Rohith, is a lawyer.On the chess side, Rathanvel’s coaching circle later expanded well beyond his first academy, with prestigious mentors such as GM Vishnu Prasanna, GM Srinath Narayanan, GM Sundararajan Kidambi, and GM Shyam Sundar all working with him in later years.
What comes next is waiting
Sitting in Assam just after the title was confirmed, Rathanvel described the feeling less as euphoria than escape. “It’s actually kind of a fulfilling feeling, because it’s been dragging on for the last four and a half years,” he said.“Basically I’m happy, but actually I’m at a loss for words to explain how I feel.”Asked what got him through, he didn’t point to ambition or rankings.“When I saw the way my parents were hoping to cross that line, that was the only thing that kept me going,” he said. “It also kind of gives a sense of completion and closure. It was something that was missing, but luckily I was able to get things done today.”It’s realistic about what the GM title changes and what it doesn’t. Major invitational events, he knows, are still out of reach.“I’m not sure if I’m going to get it, because once you get into 2650 or something higher than that, you’re going to be selected for those events,” he said. “But in general, becoming a kind of Grandmaster makes the organizers focus on you easily, and you get accommodation and other things, which makes your financial burden less.”READ ALSO: India gets its 98th GM! Both parents chess coaches, 10th board exam forced a break: The creation of Aswath S He already teaches chess online as a freelance tutor, and an academy of his own, he says, is in the works.“I can’t say I’ll be out of chess,” he said, when asked if the sport is a career or something more temporary. “My life may revolve around chess.”