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 it was there that he first heard about a man named Gandhi returning from South Africa, dismissing him as a “crank” at the time. It wasn’t until Gandhi successfully organised 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 very few know about a game very few in India play these days, at least not the way they used to.Bridge is a mind sport, just like chess. Both are built on incomplete information deduced from what an opponent, or in bridge’s case, a partner, chooses to reveal. Both reward players who can hold a tree of future possibilities in their head while the clock runs. And by the account of the man who might know both worlds better than anyone in the country, they’re currently living in two very different decades.“Bridge right now is where chess was 20 years ago.” That’s what Viswanathan Anand told 17-year-old Anshul Bhatt, India’s brightest bridge prodigy, a few months ago.Twenty years ago, Indian kids barely played chess competitively. Today, India is a superpower with its growing number of Grandmasters. Bridge, Anand suggested, is standing exactly where chess once stood, unknown, under-taught, and perhaps one breakthrough away from an entirely different trajectory.Anshul is a believer. This Mumbai teenager’s selection for the senior Under-31 squad heading to China for the upcoming World Youth Bridge Transnational Championship next month is being treated, within Indian bridge circles, as something close to unprecedented. A 17-year-old skipping straight into a bracket usually reserved for players well into their twenties, competing against former open-category world champions — it is something rare.

Anshul was once a beginner

Anshul’s path into that world started with tears. As a toddler playing simple games like court piece and mendicot with his grandparents, he’d get furious 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 began as his frustration turned into something his father noticed had real shape to it.By six and a half, Anshul had a bridge coach. “At that time I used to actually sit on top of the dining table to be at eye level with the cards,” he said.

Anshul Bhatt plays bridge (Special Arrangements)

At seven, he played his first tournament, at the Indian Gymkhana, walking in as a total unknown. An opponent at his table admitted he was intimidated at the thought of losing to a seven-year-old.A year later, the Bridge Federation of India picked him 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 put 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 I played a lot of bridge and trained very diligently,” he added.

A 20-minute call with 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 got a phone call from Sachin Tendulkar. The two spoke for about 20 minutes.“I remember that conversation like yesterday, and I was shivering throughout,” Anshul told this website. He’d 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 Arrangements)

Tendulkar answered. “Anshul, if people aren’t expecting things from you, I think you should take a long, hard look in the mirror and consider whether what you’re doing is the right thing Are you sure you’re playing the right sport?” the cricketing icon told him.It’s stayed with him since.“I now look at expectations as only a good thing,” Anshul said. “It means people believe in me and think I can deliver, and all I have to do is put in the effort to try and meet them.”

Beyond the game

What separates Anshul from a simply gifted young player is what he’s chosen to do with the years in between tournaments. He’s personally taught more than 500 kids across India, running boot camps at schools and at different companies.He has built his own teaching philosophy, a curriculum to split the difference, compressing what might normally take ten weeks into a day and a half, teaching each concept through an immediate hand that demonstrates it, then reinforcing it with the next.And it’s working. Of the 50 students in his first 2023 boot camp, six went on to play the World Championships in 2024, and two became the second Indian pair ever to reach the Under-16 pairs finals, following Anshul and his partner’s breakthrough in 2019.This year, six of his former students have been picked again for India’s Under-16 and Under-21 squads. He still mentors them.Anshul’s instinct for structured, incomplete-information problem solving hasn’t stayed confined to a card table. Drawing partly on the fact that his grandfather has dementia, he ran a research study examining bridge’s effects on cognition in senior citizens, teaching the game at two old-age homes in Mumbai and working with the head of psychiatry at a BMC hospital, with promising early findings on working memory.

Anshul Bhatt built PawPath project (Special Arrangements)

Separately, he, an alumnus of Dhirubhai Ambani International School, built PawPath, a low-cost wearable system using motion sensors and machine learning to analyse canine gait for orthopaedic and neurological disorders, collecting data from more than 300 dogs across rescue centres and veterinary hospitals, including the world’s largest animal rescue centre, Vantara, in Jamnagar, Gujarat.The project won the Second Grand Award 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 at Mumbai Tech Week. That same mathematical instinct has now carried him to Stanford, where he’ll study Biomechanical Engineering.He’s careful, though, to separate his ambitions from the sport’s usual 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.”

India’s turn to look at the game

For all his own momentum, Anshul is clear-eyed about where Indian bridge actually stands, and it is nowhere near the podium yet in the open category, well behind the United States, Israel, China, and a cluster of Scandinavian countries where bridge is often taught inside the school curriculum itself.What it’s missing, in his view, isn’t talent; it’s a single unifying moment. “I think bridge also needs one big win, like Anand’s win revolutionised chess,” he said. “Something like that for bridge would be great.”ALSO READ: Indian record holder Tejas Nandakumar barred from 2026 Commonwealth Games: ‘I’m absolutely devastated’Whether that moment arrives 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 chess got twenty years ago.He just needs the rest of the country to start paying attention before he does something that makes them.