How Samay Raina provoked Anand Mahindra to start the Global Chess League

Industrialist Anand Mahindra has revealed how a challenge from comedian Samay Raina eventually led to the creation of the Global Chess League, a project he jokingly describes as the “most expensive joke” ever played on him.

Raina challenged Mahindra during an online interaction in 2020 to start a global chess league. Mahindra took him seriously and set in motion a series of talks that eventually brought FIDE President Arkady Dvorkovich and five-time world champion Viswanathan Anand into the project.

“Usually comedians bring laughter, but Samay has provoked the Global Chess League in a way,” Business Line Mahindra said at the fourth season of the Global Chess League in Bengaluru.

Mahindra explained that he was watching Raina and chess commentator Sagar Shah stream the 2020 Chess Olympiad when he noticed the growing interest in their broadcast.

“I could see that every 15 minutes the crowd of onlookers was getting bigger,” he recalled.

FROM JOKE TO GLOBAL LEAGUE

The thought soon moved beyond the conversation between Mahindra and Raina. FIDE President Arkady Dvorkovich contacted Mahindra to see if they were serious about creating a league. Mahindra was and discussions followed over the next few months.

Five-time world champion Viswanathan Anand subsequently joined the project, giving the proposed league the backing of one of the biggest names in chess.

The Global Chess League eventually took shape as a franchise-based team competition that brings together some of the world’s leading players in a format designed to make chess more accessible to a wider audience. Unlike traditional individual chess tournaments, the league puts players into teams, with franchises competing over the course of a season.

The competition features six franchises and has attracted some of the biggest names in sports. Since its inception, the league has toured international and Indian venues, with editions held in Dubai, London, Mumbai and Bengaluru.

In four seasons, the project has grown considerably beyond the idea that Raina put into Mahindra in 2020. The league now has an annual prize purse of $1 million, while its projected five-year business value is expected to exceed $40 million.

Mahindra jokingly described the project as the result of “the most expensive joke” played on it.

“If it’s a joke, it’s the most expensive joke anyone’s ever played on me,” he said.

However, Mahindra has no regrets about taking Raina’s challenge seriously.

“I’m actually enjoying the fruits of the success of that expense and effort,” he added.

ANAND MAHINDRA’S RELATION TO CHESS

Mahindra’s own relationship with chess remains rather more modest. He admitted that he continues to fight chess bots on Chess.com and is often ridiculed for his mistakes.

But those losses also shaped his view of what makes chess compelling.

Mahindra believes that the appeal of the sport lies not in the pursuit of perfect moves, but in the human element behind them. As AI becomes more capable of finding the best moves on the board, he argued, it’s still the mistakes, pressure and unpredictability of human players that keep audiences invested.

“We come together not to watch machines play. We come together to watch human beings play,” Mahindra said. “A machine can tell us what the best move is, but it’s only humans that we care about.”

And that’s perhaps what turned a comical challenge into something far more serious: a league built around the idea that chess is ultimately about the people who play it.

– The end

Issued by:

Kingshuk Kusari

Published on:

07 Sep 2026 08:58 IST