Passport, visa, Rs 6–7 lakh worth of gear missing, stranded alone in Europe: Survival of 16-year-old Md Imran, India’s future chess Grandmaster | Chess News
NEW DELHI: The bus left after 8 pm. Md Imran, hungry after eight hours on the road, walked off during a scheduled ten-minute stopover in Bratislava, Slovakia, looking only for biscuits and coffee. He returned to the stage just in time and waved shakily for the driver to wait. The driver looked straight at him, waved mockingly from his seat, and drove off anyway.Everything Imran owned disappeared with the bus. His passport. His Schengen visa. His US student visa, aimed at bringing him a scholarship at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) this fall. His phone, his power banks, his diary, close to Rs 6 – 7 lakh worth of gear. All of this was heading to Budapest without him, the night before a tournament he still had to play in June. At the age of 16, Imran was stranded alone in a foreign country. Fortunately, as it turns out, being alone in a foreign country is something he has a decade of practice with.
A child just watching TV
Imran didn’t start playing chess because someone saw something special in him. He started at the age of seven because his parents, in Kakinada, Andhra Pradesh, wanted to keep him away from screens.“I think it was introduced to me just to keep me away from all kinds of electronic devices, because I used to consume a lot of electronic media earlier,” Imran told TimesofIndia.com in an exclusive interaction. “I watch TV from morning till night.”Chess was one of the many activities his parents tried for him; skating, swimming, and gymnastics are others, but this is the one that sticks.
Md Imran (Special Arrangements)
He started beating everyone at his local academy under coach Leela Kumar, who first suggested that he try tournaments. What followed was an explosion rather than a development. In less than a year, Imran gained almost 900 rating points, jumping from 1035 to 1958.He looked for tournaments abroad and lined up sponsorship worth two to three lakh rupees to fund them. Then COVID hit. The sponsorship is gone.“When we asked the amount, they said no,” he recalled. “Even their contingencies are worse, so they can’t do that amount.”Chess, within two years, has moved almost entirely to the internet.If the over-the-board tournaments continue, Imran’s family has been priced out of the version of this trip where an adult is traveling with him. Until 2023, he made occasional trips abroad with his friends or his mother. Then, in June 2024, at the age of 14, he started traveling alone.“The only reason why I travel alone and choose to travel alone is to reduce costs,” he said simply. “If I got one of my parents or a legal guardian … I’d have to pay for an extra person. We’re not in that state.”
‘You know very quickly that the systems have failed you’
What happened next reads less like a sports story and more like a survival account. Last month, Imran arrived in Budapest after midnight with nothing. The station was locked, so he couldn’t file a report. No hotel will take him without a physical passport, as European law requires it for check-in.He ran into drivers from other bus companies, asking for help. FlixBus chat support told him to file a complaint online.He has a phone. He was very lucky.“Usually, I don’t,” he said of traveling with a charged device. “I was traveling with two phones and two power banks, but luckily, I got out with my main phone in my hand. That was my perfect lifeline.” “I have filed a barrage of official complaints with FlixBus and the authorities, but I have not received a single bit of help,” Imran said. “The cold truth is that they did nothing, and my conclusion is that they are completely unreliable.”For most people, this is the point where the story stops. For Imran, it was the starting line of the First Saturday Round Robin, a tournament he went to specifically to maintain a Grandmaster rule. He had every reason to withdraw. He has a high fever. He spends his mornings shuttling between police stations and the US Embassy instead of preparing openings. He chose to play anyway.He finished 7/9, undefeated, and claimed his first Grandmaster rule. Later, the second rule came with the same 7/9 run in the 5th Rigo Janos Memorial.Three weeks earlier, he was rated 2460 with zero norms. He is now 2496, needing only one open rule to complete the title.
On the brink of becoming a Grandmaster
“I have never had real, consistent coaching,” he, who has now returned to India after being issued a new passport, told this website. “I always felt like I was just wasting money on them, and they couldn’t really dedicate the proper time to me anyway. So, I decided to do everything by myself.”He became an International Master alone in 2024. He crossed 2500 alone. The two rules of the GM come in the same way, except for short, targeted help: a part of IM Radoslav Gajek between 2023 and 2025, and Levin Guy, an Israeli player with a score of 2473, who reached after learning about the incident in Bratislava and offered the second him for free.
Md Imran with his GM rule (Special Arrangements)
The amount behind self-taught climbing is surprising in itself. Approximately 257 rated games in 2024 and 283 in 2025, by his account, the highest of any player in the world in that year.“I would never recommend anyone go down this road,” he said. “I don’t even have an ideal resource that a player needs to become an IM. I oppose every good way to improve chess.”Asked what he would really say to someone trying to follow his path: “All you need is to believe in yourself,” he said. “If you believe in God, then of course you have to believe in God more than yourself. And after that, you have to believe in yourself. That’s it.”
A family of four, and a mortgage before the bus
Imran’s home is small against the scale of what it brings: his mother, a homemaker; his father, a policeman for 22 years now stationed in Visakhapatnam; and a younger brother, four years behind him.“We’re not doing very well financially or anything,” Imran said. “I think we still have about 40, 50 lakh rupees of loans that my father took out in the last two years.” The losses in Bratislava were simply piled on top of it. “It doesn’t get any better,” he said. “We’re definitely in a lot of trouble even now after I’ve met these two criteria.”
“This is the first thing why I slowly started to lose interest in chess,
International Teacher Md Imran
When Imran became an International Master two years ago, he hoped his state would take notice. Andhra Pradesh has not held an IM in seven or eight years, he said, and its own sports policy promises cash rewards for FM and IM titles. Imran and his family filed it a year and a half ago.“At the moment we don’t have any help to get the amount,” he said. “I have no idea.”That silence, more than the bus in Bratislava, is what really destroyed his relationship with the game.“This is the first thing why I slowly lost my appetite for chess,” he admitted. “The only people who respect my situation and respect my position are the US chess team,” he said of his scholarship at UTRGV.He describes his relationship with the sport today in more neutral terms: “I don’t necessarily love chess, but I don’t hate it either. I just want to finish this title. I don’t have a big passion behind me. It’s just because of the support I didn’t get like other people.”
The call for help
He now has a new passport; his Schengen visa application is being reviewed. His F-1 visa had been approved before the tragic bus incident. The visa must be reissued in his new passport at a US consular office.ALSO READ: India gets its 98th GM! Both parents chess coaches, 10th board exam forced to take a break: The making of Aswath SHe emailed the embassy in Budapest and the consulate in Hyderabad, flagging the emergency, but got no response, leaving him with no confirmed path or timeline to reissue the visa before his August 23 orientation deadline.“I really want someone to help me, in any way they can,” she said. “I really hope I can get a visa by then, because I really can’t afford to fail.”
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