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

Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel with Mahatma Gandhi and Anshul Bhatt with chess legend Viswanathan Anand NEW DELHI: As a young lawyer in Ahmedabad, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel spent his evenings playing bridge and smoking cigars at the Gujarat Club, where he first heard of a man named Gandhi who had returned from South Africa and dismissed him as a “crazy man”. It was only when Gandhi successfully organized the Champaran Satyagraha in 1917 that Patel took him seriously, abandoned his European suits and card games, including bridge, and joined the freedom struggle. It’s a detail that not many people know about a game that very few people play in India today, at least not the way it used to be.Bridge is a mental sport, just like chess. Both are built on incomplete information derived from what the adversary, or in Bridge’s case, the partner, chooses to reveal. Both reward players who can keep a tree of future possibilities in their heads while the clock ticks down. And according to the story of a man who perhaps knows both worlds better than anyone else in the country, they currently live in two very different decades.“Bridge is right now where chess was 20 years ago. That’s what Viswanathan Anand told 17-year-old Anshul Bhatt, India’s brightest bridge, a few months ago.Twenty years ago, Indian children barely played chess competitively. Today, India is a superpower with a growing number of Grandmasters. Bridge, Anand suggested, stands exactly where chess once stood, unknown, understudied, and perhaps one breakthrough from an entirely different trajectory.Anshul is a believer. The Mumbai teenager’s selection in the senior under-31 team heading to China for the upcoming World Youth Bridge Championship next month is seen as almost unprecedented in Indian bridge circles. A 17-year-old jumping straight into a bracket usually reserved for players over the age of 20 is competing against former world champions in the open category – that’s something rare.

Anshul was once a beginner

Anshul’s journey into this world began with tears. As a toddler playing simple games like court or mendicot with his grandparents, he would become enraged whenever they forgot which cards had already been played.“I would start crying and say what are you doing?” he recalled during an exclusive interaction with TimesofIndia.com. What started as his frustration turned into something his father noticed took real form.At half past six, Anshul had a bridge coach. “Back then, I was actually sitting on the dining room table to be at eye level with the cards,” he said.

Anshul Bhatt plays bridge (special arrangement)

At the age of seven, he played his first tournament in India’s Gymkhana, in which he was a complete unknown. A rival at his table admitted that he was terrified of losing to a seven-year-old.A year later, the Bridge Federation of India selected him for the under-16 squad, making him the youngest player at the 2017 World Youth Bridge Championship in Lyon, France, where he won the Joan Gerard Award for the most promising young talent of the tournament.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 played a lot of bridge and trained very hard,” he added.

A 20 minute call with Sachin Tendulkar

Somewhere in the middle of all this, ahead of the 2022 U-16 World Cup in Italy, where Anshul won all three gold medals on offer, he got a call from Sachin Tendulkar. The two talked for about 20 minutes.“I remember the interview like it was yesterday and I was shivering the whole time,” Anshul told this website. He asked Tendulkar the question every young athlete eventually asks: how do you carry the weight of other people’s expectations?

Anshul Bhatt with Sachin Tendulkar (special arrangement)

replied Tendulkar. “Anshul, if people don’t expect anything 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 playing the right sport?” the cricket icon told him.It has stayed with him ever since.“Now I look at expectations only as a good thing,” Anshul said. “It means people believe in me and think I can do it and all I have to do is put in the effort and try to meet them.”

Out of play

What sets Anshul apart from a simply gifted young player is what he chooses to do with the years between tournaments. He has personally taught more than 500 children all over India, conducted training camps in schools and various companies.He developed his own teaching philosophy, a split-difference curriculum, compressing what would normally take ten weeks into a day and a half, teaching each concept with a direct hand that demonstrates it and then reinforces it with another.And it works. Of the 50 students in his first bootcamp in 2023, six went on to the 2024 World Cup and two became the second Indian pair ever to reach the Under-16 pairs final after Anshul and his partner’s breakthrough in 2019.This year, six of his former students were again selected for the Indian under-16 and under-21 teams. He still mentors them.Anshul’s instinct for structured problem solving with incomplete information was not limited to the card table. Drawing in part on the fact that his grandfather had dementia, he conducted a research study examining the effects of bridge on cognitive function in the elderly, taught the game at two nursing homes in Mumbai, and collaborated with the chief of psychiatry at BMC Hospital with promising early findings on working memory.

Anshul Bhatt built the PawPath project (special arrangement)

Separately, he, a graduate of Dhirubhai Ambani International School, built PawPath, a low-cost wearable system using motion sensors and machine learning to analyze dog gait for orthopedic and neurological disorders, collecting data from more than 300 dogs in rescue centers and veterinary hospitals, including the world’s largest animal rescue center, Vantanagarara, Gujaratm, Gujaratm.The project won the Second Grand Prize in Animal Sciences at the 2025 Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair in the US, and Anshul has since presented it at the India AI Summit in Nice and Mumbai Tech Week. That same mathematical instinct has now led him to Stanford, where he will study biomechanical engineering.However, he is careful to separate his ambitions from the usual sports career path. “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 major events, but not be a pro.

It’s India’s turn to watch the game

For all his own momentum, Anshul is clear-eyed about where Indian bridge really stands, and in the open category he’s nowhere near the podium, far behind the United States, Israel, China and a cluster of Scandinavian countries where bridge is often taught as part of the school curriculum itself.What he lacks, he says, is not talent; it is the only unifying moment. “I think bridge also needs one big victory, like Anand’s victory revolutionized chess,” he said. “Something like that for Bridge would be great.READ ALSO: Indian record holder Tejas Nandakumar rules out 2026 Commonwealth Games: ‘I’m 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 bridge deserves the same shot as chess did twenty years ago.He just needs the rest of the country to start paying attention before he does something to make them.

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