NEW DELHI: As a young lawyer in Ahmedabad, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel he spent his evenings at the Gujarat Club, where he played bridge and smoked cigars, and it was there that he first heard of a man named Gandhi returning from South Africa, who dismissed him as a “crank” at the time. It was not until Gandhi successfully organized the Champaran Satyagraha in 1917 that Patel took it seriously, abandoned his European clothes and card games, including bridge, and joined the freedom struggle. It is a detail that very few know about a game very few in India play these days, at least not like before.Bridge is a mind sport, like chess. Both are built on incomplete information deduced from what an opponent, or in the case of bridge, a partner, chooses to reveal. Both reward players who can hold a tree of future possibilities in their head while the clock is running. And by the account of the man who might know both worlds better than anyone in the country, they currently live in two very different decades. “Bridge now is where chess was 20 years ago.” That’s what Viswanathan Anand told 17-year-old Anshul Bhatt, India’s brightest bridge prodigy, a few months ago.Twenty years ago, Indian children barely played competitive chess. Today, India is a superpower with its growing number of Grandmasters. Bridge, Anand suggested, is exactly where chess used to be, unknown, little taught, and perhaps one step away from an entirely different trajectory.Anshul is a believer. The selection of this Mumbai teenager for the senior Under-31 team heading to China for the upcoming World Youth Bridge Transnational Championship next month is being treated, in Indian bridge circles, as something almost unprecedented. A 17-year-old jumping straight into a bracket usually reserved for players in their twenties, competing against former world champions of the open category – that’s something rare.
Anshul was once a beginner
Anshul’s path to that world began with tears. As a child playing simple games like backgammon and mendicot with his grandparents, he would get furious whenever they forgot which cards had already been played.“I start crying and I say, what are you doing?” he recalled during an exclusive interaction with TimesofIndia.com. What started as his frustration turned into something that his father noticed had a real shape.By half past six, Anshul had a bridge coach. “At that time I had to actually sit on the dining table to be at eye level with the cards,” he said.
Anshul Bhatt playing bridge (Special Arrangements)
At seven, he played his first tournament, at the Indian Gymkhana, walking in as a total unknown. An opponent at his table admitted that he was intimidated at the thought of losing to a seven-year-old boy.A year later, the Bridge Federation of India selected him for the Under-16 team, making him the youngest player at the World Youth Bridge Championships in Lyon, France in 2017, where he won the Joan Gerard Award for the tournament’s most promising talent.When the COVID-19 pandemic brought the entire world to a standstill, Anshul focused on honing his skills. “It was very good for me because school was only three or four hours. I had a lot of time at home, and I played a lot of bridge and trained very diligently,” he added.
A 20 minute call with Sachin Tendulkar
In the midst of all this, before the 2022 Under-16 World Championships in Italy, where Anshul won all three gold medals on offer, I got a phone call from Sachin Tendulkar. The two talked for about 20 minutes.“I remember that conversation like it was yesterday, and I was shaking all over,” Anshul told this website. He had asked Tendulkar the question every young athlete eventually asks: how does he carry the weight of other people’s expectations?
Anshul Bhatt with Sachin Tendulkar (Special Arrangements)
Tendulkar replied. “Anshul, if people don’t expect things from you, I think you should take a long, hard look in the mirror and consider if what you’re doing is the right thing. Are you sure you’re the right sport?” the cricket icon told him.She has been with him ever since.“Now I look at expectations as only a good thing,” said Anshul. “It means people believe in me and think I can deliver, and all I have to do is put in the effort to try to meet it.
Beyond the game
What separates Anshul from a simply gifted youngster is what he chose to do with the years between tournaments. He has personally taught more than 500 children across India, conducting boot camps in schools and various companies.He built his own teaching philosophy, a curriculum to split the difference, compressing what might normally take ten weeks into a day and a half, teaching each concept through an immediate hands-on demonstration, then reinforcing it with the next.And it works. Of the 50 students in its first boot camp in 2023, six have played in the World Championships in 2024, and two have become the second Indian pair ever to reach the Under-16 pairs final, after Anshul and his partner in 2019.This year, six of his former students were again selected for the India Under-16 and Under-21 teams. I always mentor them.Anshul’s instinct for solving structured and incomplete problems has not been confined to a card table. Based in part on the fact that his grandfather has dementia, he conducted a research study that examined the effects of bridge on cognition in the elderly, teaching the game to two old men in Mumbai and working with the head of psychiatry at a BMC hospital, with the first promising results on working memory.
Anshul Bhatt built the PawPath project (Special Arrangements)
Separately, he, an alumnus of Dhirubhai Ambani International School, built PawPath, a low-cost wearable system using motion sensors and machine learning to analyze canine gait for orthopedic and neurological disorders, collecting data from more than 300 dogs in rescue centers and veterinary hospitals, including the largest animal rescue center in the world, Vantarasco Jam.The project won the Second Grand Award in Animal Sciences at the Regeneron 2025 International Science and Engineering Fair in the United States, and Anshul has since presented it at the India AI Summit in Nice and at Mumbai Tech Week. That same mathematical instinct has now led him to Stanford, where he will study Biomechanical Engineering.He is careful, however, to separate his ambitions from the usual sports career. “I don’t want to play bridge professionally. I want to be a world-class amateur,” he said. “I want to try to win all the important events but not be a professional.”
India’s turn to see the game
For all his momentum, Anshul has a clear eye on where the Indian bridge is, and it is not close to the podium even in the open category, well behind the United States, Israel, China, and a group of Scandinavian countries where the bridge is often taught in the school curriculum itself.What is missing, in his view, is not talent; it is a unique unifying moment. “I think bridge also needs a big win, like Anand’s win revolutionized chess,” he said. “Something like that for the bridge would be great.”READ ALSO: Indian record holder Tejas Nandakumar ruled out of 2026 Commonwealth Games: ‘I am absolutely devastated’Whether that moment arrives on a card table in China next month, or somewhere further down the line, Anshul Bhatt has spent more than a decade building the case that deck deserves the same chess move it did twenty years ago.You just need the rest of the country to start paying attention before you do something that affects them.