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NEW DELHI: As a young lawyer in Ahmedabad, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel he spent his evenings at the Gujarat Club, where he played bridge and smoked cigars, and it was there that he first heard of a man named Gandhi who had returned from South Africa, calling him “crazy” at the time. It was only when Gandhi successfully organized the Champaran Satyagraha in 1917 that Patel took it seriously, abandoned his European suits and card games, including bridge, and joined the freedom struggle. This is a detail that very few people know about a game that is played by very few people in India today, at least not like before.Bridge is a mind sport, just like chess. Both are built on incomplete information derived from what the opponent, or in the case of Bridge, the partner, chooses to reveal. Both reward players who can keep a tree of future possibilities in their head for the duration of the clock. And according to the man who perhaps knows both worlds better than anyone in the country, they are currently living in two very different decades.“Bridge is currently where chess was 20 years ago.” that’s what Viswanathan Anand he told 17-year-old Anshul Bhatt, India’s smartest bridge prodigy, a few months ago.Twenty years ago, Indian children hardly competed in chess. Today, India is a superpower with an increasing number of grandmasters. Bridge, Anand suggested, stands exactly where chess once stood, unknown, understudied and perhaps one step away from an entirely different trajectory.Anshul is a believer. The Mumbai teenager’s selection for the senior Under-31 team heading to China for the upcoming World Youth Bridge Championship next month is being treated, in Indian bridge circles, as something almost unheard of. A 17-year-old jumping straight into a division usually reserved for players in their twenties, competing against former world champions in the open division — that’s something rare.
Anshul was once a beginner
Anshul’s journey into that world begins with tears. As a toddler playing simple games like courtroom and mendicot with his grandparents, he would get mad 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 shape.By half past six, Anshul had a bridge coach. “At the time I was actually sitting on top of the dining room table to be eye level with the cards,” he said.
Anshul Bhatt plays bridge (special arrangements)
At the age of seven, he played his first tournament, in the Indian Gymkhana, entering as a total unknown. The opponent admitted at his table that he was frightened by 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 national team, 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 the school lasted only three or four hours. “I had a lot of time at home, played a lot of bridge and trained hard,” he added.
20-minute conversation with Sachin Tendulkar
Somewhere in the middle of all this, ahead of the 2022 Under-16 World Cup in Italy, where Anshul won all three gold medals on offer, Sachin Tendulkar called him. The two talked for about 20 minutes.I remember that conversation like it was yesterday and I was shaking all the time, Anshul told this website. He asked Tendulkar the question that every young athlete eventually asks: how do you withstand the weight of other people’s expectations?
Anshul Bhatt with Sachin Tendulkar (Special Arrangements)
Tendulkar replied. “Anshul, if people don’t expect anything 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 sport?” the cricket icon told him.He 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 make an effort to try to meet them.”
Outside the game
What separates Anshul from simply being a gifted young player is what he chooses to do with the years between tournaments. He has personally taught more than 500 children across India, conducting training camps in schools and various companies.He built his own teaching philosophy, a split-the-differences curriculum, condensing what would normally take ten weeks into a day and a half, teaching each concept through a direct hands-on demonstration, then reinforcing it with the next.And it works. Of the 50 students in his first training camp in 2023, six went on to play in the 2024 World Cup and two became the second Indian pair ever to reach the Under-16 doubles final, after Anshulov and his partner did in 2019.This year, six of his former students were again selected for the Indian under-16 and under-21 teams. He is still their mentor.Anshul’s instinct for structured problem solving with incomplete information did not remain confined to the card table. Drawing partly on the fact that his grandfather suffers from dementia, he led a research study examining the effects of bridge on cognition in senior citizens, teaching the game at two nursing homes in Mumbai and working with the head of psychiatry at BMC Hospital, with promising early findings on working memory.
Anshul Bhatt built the PawPath Project (Special Arrangements)
Separately, he built PawPath, a low-cost wearable system that uses motion sensors and machine learning to analyze dogs’ 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, Vantara, in Jamnagar, Gujarat.The project won the second grand prize in animal sciences at the Regeneron 2025 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 carefully separates his ambitions from the usual sports career. “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 important competitions, but not be a professional.”
It is India’s turn to watch the game
Despite his own momentum, Anshul is clear about where Indian bridge really stands, and it is nowhere near the podium in the open category, far behind the United States, Israel, China and a number of Scandinavian countries where bridge is often taught as part of the school curriculum.What is missing, in his opinion, is not talent; it is a unifying moment. “I think bridge also needs one big win, like Anand’s win revolutionized chess,” he said. – Something like that for bridge would be great.READ ALSO: Indian record holder Tejas Nandakumar banned from 2026 Commonwealth Games: ‘I’m absolutely devastated’Whether that moment comes on the card table in China next month or somewhere down the road, Anshul Bhatt has spent more than a decade making the case that bridge deserves the same shot that chess got twenty years ago.He just needs the rest of the country to start paying attention before he does something that makes them.
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