NEW DELHI: Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, felt as though the wait was almost over. Nearly 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 killed, and I alone was left,” a depleted Odysseus says at one point in Homer’s ancient Greek epic The Odyssey. But, even in his darkest moments of despair and doubt, he never abandons his longing to see Ithaca again.Rathanvel VS, like Odysseus, felt as if he was in touching distance of his destiny, the elusive Grandmaster (GM) title in this case, only to see it slipping away time and again. “I could have probably become a Grandmaster four years ago,” he told TimesofIndia.com during an exclusive interview. He didn’t have to wait for norms. He collected those with ease. What he waited four and a half years for was a number: 2500. The Elo rating that turns a Grandmaster norm into an actual Grandmaster.On Saturday, in Assam, he finally crossed it.“You know that feel where you know you’re worthy of it, but somehow you’re not still getting there,” an elated and perhaps relieved Rathanvel added from Guwahati during his first-ever visit to India’s Northeast.Now he doesn’t have to wonder anymore. Rathanvel VS is India’s 99th Grandmaster.
A chessboard that came free
There was no grand chess lineage in the Rathanvel household in Coimbatore. “I got Horlicks or Complan, I don’t remember which one, when I was six or seven years old,” he said. “And they gave a chessboard free with it, so I kind of started pestering my mother to play with me.”What began as a child badgering his mother over a free board turned, over time, into enrollment at a nearby academy under two local coaches, Krishnamoorthy and Dhansekar, names Rathanvel still credits with real gratitude.“To this date I’m very thankful to them,” he said.The rise that followed was not a straight line. By 2019, he’d crossed 2400 and picked up four IM norms at the Abu Dhabi Masters.
By 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 followed in 2022.On paper, Rathanvel had done everything a player needs to become a Grandmaster. He just didn’t have the rating to go with it.
Stuck at the edge
What followed was less a plateau than a loop. “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 blunder away winning games,” Rathanvel revealed.“Once a slide happens, it just goes on. I bleed like fifteen, twenty points at a stretch, and then fix it, come back. It was kind of a pattern.“It was at times very depressing. I’ve had loss of sleep and a lot of those things related with it.”Injury and circumstance compounded the wait. He fractured his hand twice. COVID shut down international travel just as he was building momentum.College, a mechanical engineering degree at Hindustan College in Coimbatore, pulled focus during stretches the 2001-born might otherwise have spent chasing the rating.During his hunt for the 2500-rating mark, the lowest point came in 2025, in a game against David Paravyan in Abu Dhabi.“I knew I was winning. But somehow I just started blundering things, and I knew things were getting out of control,” he said. “That was actually very heartbreaking. At a point, I also felt that maybe I should probably take a bigger break and then try something else.”He didn’t. Instead, on July 1 this year, sitting at 2492, he travelled to Assam for two rating tournaments.He deliberately entered rounds against lower-rated opposition, players under 1600, and simply didn’t lose. Ten straight wins. Eight Elo points. The number he’d chased for four and a half years finally clicked over.
Lucky, but not so lucky…
“Every chess player, if they are from very rich backgrounds, will not have any financial issues. But generally, people who are not from those kinds of backgrounds usually have issues,” he told this website.“In this case, I was very lucky. I was offered a sponsorship by MPL, Mobile Premier League. They supported me from 2019 to 2025.”In an MPL-organised event called the Chess Mahayudh, Rathanvel played twelve hours non-stop, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m, against a stream of opponents, beating a Grandmaster and drawing five others along the way, finishing with 256 wins out of 265 games and the tournament’s top prize of Rs 5 lakh.
However, that support didn’t 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 his toughest years came to an end.Behind that financial lifeline is also a family running its own small business. His 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 like GM Vishnu Prasanna, GM Srinath Narayanan, GM Sundararajan Kidambi, and GM Shyam Sundar all having worked with him in the years since.
What comes after the wait
Sitting in Assam just after the title was confirmed, Rathanvel described the feeling less as elation than escape. “It is actually like a kind of fulfilling feeling, because it has been dragging on for the past four and a half years,” he said.“Deep down I’m happy, but I’m actually at a loss of words to explain how I feel.”Asked what carried him through it, he didn’t point to ambition or rankings.“When I saw the way my parents were kind of hoping for me to cross that line, that was the only thing which kept me going,” he said. “It also kind of gives you a sense of fulfilment and closure. That was something which was missing, but luckily I managed to make things end today.”He’s realistic about what the GM title changes and what it doesn’t. Top invitational events, he knows, are still out of reach.“I’m not sure if I’ll get it, because once you enter 2650 or anything higher than that, you’ll be selected for those events,” he said. “But in general, becoming a Grandmaster kind of makes organisers focus on you easily, and you get accommodation and other things, which kind of makes your financial burden less.”ALSO READ: India gets its 98th GM! Both parents chess coaches, 10th board exam forced a break: The making of Aswath S He is already teaching chess online as a freelance tutor, and an academy of his own, he says, is in the works.“I cannot say that I’ll be out of chess,” he said, when asked whether the sport is a career or something more temporary. “My life might be revolving around chess.”
