AIM Chess League Wants to Bring India’s IT Minds on the Same Board

What began with Viswanathan Anand as India’s presence in global chess has developed into a steady pipeline of players competing and winning at the highest level. 

The country now produces grandmasters at scale, delivers consistent results across major tournaments, and, with Gukesh Dommaraju’s world championship win, holds the record for the youngest world champion.

Alongside these achievements, interest in the game has grown significantly. A country once centred on cricket now spends considerable time playing chess online. 

Increased internet access and the rise of content creators have changed how the game is perceived and consumed. Platforms like Chess.com report approximately 19.5 million registered users from India, making the country one of the largest active player bases globally.

In a one-of-a-kind initiative, AIM is launching a national chess league for IT and AI professionals.

The AIM Chess League will run from July to October, beginning with a national online league from July 6 to August 31, followed by offline qualifiers across India in September, and concluding with a grand final at Cypher 2026 in Bengaluru from October 7 to 9. Interested participants can register and find more details about the schedule on the website.

The format is designed for working professionals. Weekly online matches follow a rapid 10-minute format, allowing participation without disrupting work schedules.

A total prize pool of ₹10 lakh is allocated across individual and team categories, with top performers advancing to the final stage. The final is positioned as a live competitive event, with matches played in front of an audience and streamed. The champion earns a prize money of ₹3 lakh.

The league also recognises top performers with ₹1.5 lakh for the runner-up, ₹50,000 each for the top five finishers, and ₹2 lakh for the best company team.

The league is structured at both the individual and company levels. Professionals can compete independently, while organisations can field multiple players whose performances contribute to a company leaderboard. The outcome is not limited to individual rankings but extends to how teams represent their organisations at a national level.

Participation is open across the technology ecosystem, including IT services, product and SaaS teams, data and AI roles, cybersecurity, cloud, startups, and engineering students. The scale is designed to accommodate over one lakh participants nationwide.

Over the past decade, AIM has brought India’s tech community together through events spanning multiple domains—from the Machine Learning Developer Summit (MLDS) and Data Engineering Summit (DES) to startup-focused Happy Llama and its flagship Cypher conference.

“But I also wanted to engage the community beyond purely technical events,” says Bhasker Gupta, CEO of AIM Media House. “The first idea that came to mind was sport—something that could bring everyone together online.” That thinking ultimately led him to chess.

Chess has long been associated with structured thinking and decision-making. It builds clarity, patience, and foresight over time. 

The way each game unfolds through constraints, sequences, and consequences shapes how one approaches problems. And this pattern of thinking, built through repeated play, often carries into how professionals navigate challenges in today’s technology environment.

“Many times in the game of chess, you reach a position which is pretty complex. On the board, you have 64 squares, 32 pieces, and so many combinations of what can happen, and it keeps changing with every move. The same happens with an organisation, but you still have fewer permutations and combinations to deal with,” says Lokesh Natoo, a chess player and a corporate industry veteran with close to two decades of experience.

He points out that chess builds restraint as much as it builds calculation. Moves that appear strong in isolation often fail when viewed across a sequence, which forces players to pause, evaluate, and avoid decisions that optimise for immediate gains at the expense of long-term position. 

Over time, that habit carries into how problems are approached in professional settings, where decisions must hold beyond the first-order outcome.

“Keeping your cool under a tricky situation is something that chess has taught me a lot. You don’t need to show it on the board. You don’t see that you’re scared,” Natoo says. 

He also stresses resourcefulness as a key lesson he has learned from chess that he often utilises in his work. 

Not every game is played from a position of strength, and even as players often lose key pieces, they must continue to sustain the game with what remains. Natoo explains that the objective shifts from winning cleanly to holding ground, recovering, or creating new opportunities from limited options. 

Besides, Gupta also reiterates the crux of the game—thinking 10 moves ahead, not just the next one —a mindset that is essential today in the fast-evolving world of tech. 

Besides, problem-solving is rarely taught directly in a course or bootcamp. It is built over time through practice and exposure to constraints, and chess remains one of the few systems that develop it in a consistent, repeatable way.

“Technology, programming, digital mindset—most of this is rooted in logic, which is integral to chess,” he says. “Many of these aspects are also part of being innovative or creative.”

This is where algorithmic thinking comes in. In both chess and programming, the process begins with an outcome and works backwards through a sequence of steps. Each move or instruction depends on the previous one and shapes the next.

That alignment becomes even more relevant in the AI era, where code can be generated quickly, and products can be ‘vibe-coded’ in minutes. 

What remains difficult is defining the right problem, structuring the approach, and evaluating outcomes, areas that cannot be automated, and where chess offers a great avenue to build these skills in the long term. 

“The idea is not to try to be a great player like Anand, but to develop these skills. You see where you are, where you need to reach in the next few moves, and plan accordingly. It’s very similar to how a programmer thinks.”