Around the time Gukesh Dommaraju became the youngest world champion in history of chess in December, Indian chess also made its mark elsewhere. On the popular Chess.com app, India overtook the USA as the “most active country” on the platform, another indicator that not just the protagonists in the thick of action, but spectators following it were also overwhelmingly from India. Right after the three-week battle between Gukesh and Ding Liren in Singapore culminated with the teenager from Chennai become the second Indian to be crowned the world champion after Viswanathan Anand, Chess.com saw what it called a “Gukesh wave”: for three straight days, the app hosted 17 million games daily — the highest daily number in 2024 — at a rate of 15 more games starting per second during peak hours. In the eye of this online chess storm was India. The world’s most populous country currently has 19.5 million registrations, says Avadh Shah, who is the India Director for Chess.com. He points out that an average of 500k new users download the app …