Once played by Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, bridge seeks India’s ‘chess’ moment: How 17-year-old Anshul Bhatt leads its revival | More Sports News

Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel with Mahatma Gandhi and Anshul Bhatt with chess legend Viswanathan Anand

NEW DELHI: As a young barrister in Ahmedabad, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel spent his evenings at the Gujarat Club, where he would play bridge and smoke cigars, and there he first heard about a man named Gandhi who had returned from South Africa, dismissing him as a “crank” at the time. It wasn’t until Gandhi successfully organized the Champaran Satyagraha in 1917 that Patel took him seriously, abandoned his European suit and card games, including bridge, and joined the freedom struggle. It’s a detail that few know about a game that few in India play today, at least not in the way they used to.Bridge is a mind sport, like chess. Both are built on incomplete information derived 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 odds over their head while the clock runs down. And by the account of the man who knows both worlds better than anyone in the country, they now live in two very different decades.“Bridge today was chess 20 years ago.” That’s it Viswanathan Anand said 17-year-old Anshul Bhatt, India’s brightest bridge, a few months ago.Twenty years ago, children in India could hardly play competitive chess. Today, India is a superpower with an increasing number of Grandmasters. Bridge, Anand suggests, stands exactly where chess stands, unknown, under-taught, and perhaps a collapse from a different path.Anshul is a believer. The selection of this Mumbai teenager for the senior Under-31 squad heading to China for the upcoming World Youth Bridge Transnational Championship next month is regarded, within Indian bridge circles, as something close to unprecedented. A 17-year-old skipping straight into a bracket usually reserved for players up to twenty years old, competing against former open-category world champions – this is something rare.

Anshul was a novice then

Anshul’s path to that world begins with tears. As a small child playing simple games like court piece and mendicot with his grandparents, he would get angry every time they forgot which cards had already been played.“I’m going to start crying and say, what are you doing?” he recalled during an exclusive interaction with TimesofIndia.com. What started out as his frustration turned into something that his father noticed had a real shape to it.At six and a half, Anshul had a bridge coach. “At the time I was actually sitting on top of the dining room table to eye level the cards,” he said.

Anshul Bhatt plays bridge (Special Arrangements)

At seven, he played in his first tournament, at the Indian Gymkhana, walking in as an unknown. An opponent at his table admitted that he dreaded the thought of losing to a seven-year-old.A year later, he was selected by the Bridge Federation of India for the Under-16 squad, 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 young talent.When the COVID-19 pandemic brought the entire world to a standstill, Anshul focused on improving his skills. “It’s great for me because school is only three or four hours. I have a lot of time at home, and I play a lot of bridge and train hard,” he added.

A 20-minute call to Sachin Tendulkar

Somewhere in the middle of all this, before the 2022 Under-16 World Championships in Italy, where Anshul went on to win all three gold medals on offer, he received a phone call from Sachin Tendulkar. The two talked for about 20 minutes.“I remember the conversation like it was yesterday, and I was shaking throughout,” Anshul told this website. He asked Tendulkar the question every young athlete asks: how do you carry the weight of other people’s expectations?

Anshul Bhatt with Sachin Tendulkar (Special Arrangements)

Tendulkar responded. “Anshul, if people don’t expect things from you, I think you should take a long, hard look in the mirror and think if what you’re doing is the right thing. Are you sure you’re playing the right game?” the cricketing icon told him.It has stayed with him ever since.“I now see expectations as a good thing,” says Anshul. “It means that people believe in me and think that I can save, and all I have to do is try to try and meet them.”

Beyond the game

What separates Anshul from an ordinary talented young player is what he chooses to do in the years between tournaments. He has personally taught over 500 children across India, running boot camps in schools and various companies.He established his own philosophy of teaching, a curriculum to divide the difference, compressing what is usually obtained in ten weeks in a day and a half, teaching each concept through an immediate hand that shows it, then reinforcing it in the next.And it worked. Of the 50 students in its first 2023 boot camp, six went on to play in the World Championships in 2024, and two became the second Indian pair to reach the Under-16 pairs finals, after Anshul and his partner’s breakthrough in 2019.This year, six of his former students have again been selected for India’s Under-16 and Under-21 squads. He still taught them.Anshul’s instinct for structured, non-exhaustive problem-solving information did not remain confined to a card table. Focusing on the fact that his grandfather had dementia, he ran a research study that examined the effects of the bridge on the cognition of senior citizens, taught the game at two old people’s homes in Mumbai and worked with the head of psychiatry at a BMC hospital, with promising early findings on working memory.

Anshul Bhatt founded the PawPath project (Special Arrangements)

Separately, he, an alumnus of the Dhirubhai Ambani International School, founded PawPath, a low-cost functional system using movement sensors and machine learning to analyze canine gait for orthopedic and neurological diseases, collecting data from more than 300 dogs in rescue centers and veterinary hospitals, including the largest animal rescue center in the world, Vantara, in Jamaratnagar.The project won the Second Grand Award in Animal Sciences at the 2025 Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair in the US, and Anshul presented it at the India AI Summit in Nice and the Mumbai Tech Week. That same mathematical instinct has led him to Stanford, where he will study Biomechanical Engineering.He was careful, however, to separate his ambitions from the usual sports career track. “I don’t want to play bridge professionally. I want to be a world-class amateur,” he said. “I want to try and win all the important events but not be a professional.”

It’s India’s turn to watch the game

For all his own momentum, Anshul has a clear view of where Indian bridge stands, and it is nowhere near the podium in the open category, behind the United States, Israel, China, and a cluster of Scandinavian countries where bridge is regularly taught within the school curriculum itself.What it lacks, in his view, is not talent; it’s a unifying moment. “I think bridge should also be a big win, like Anand’s win that changed chess,” he said. “Something like that for the bridge would be great.”ALSO READ: India’s record holder Tejas Nandakumar banned from 2026 Commonwealth Games: ‘I am absolutely devastated’Whether that moment comes 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 the bridge deserves the same shot chess got twenty years ago.He just needs the rest of the country to start paying attention before he does something that will turn them on.