NEW DELHI: As a young advocate in Ahmedabad, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel he spent the evening at the Gujarat Club, where he played bridge and smoked cigarettes, and it was there that he first heard about a man named Gandhi who had come from South Africa, dismissing him as an “insult” at the time. It was not until Gandhi successfully organized the Champaran Satyagraha in 1917 that Patel took him seriously, ditched his European suits and card games, including bridge, and joined the freedom struggle. Few details are known about the very few sports in India that are played today, not how they are played.Bridge is a mind game, like chess. All of this is built on incomplete information that the opponent, or on the bridge, the partner, chooses to reveal. They all reward players who can hold future value in their heads while the clock is ticking. And speaking of a man who knows all these countries better than anyone else in the country, he lives in twenty different years. “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, a few months ago.Twenty years ago, Indian children did not play chess competitively. Today, India is very strong with the number of Grandmasters. Bridge, Anand pointed out, stands exactly where chess once stood, unknown, understudied, and perhaps one very different strategy.Anshul is a believer. The Mumbai teenager’s selection in the under-31 senior team heading to China for the World Youth Bridge Transnational Championship next month is being seen, within Indian bridge, as unprecedented. A 17-year-old boy jumping into the bracket usually reserved for players up to the age of twenty, competing with former world champions – is a rare thing.
Anshul was once the first
Anshul’s journey to that world began with tears. As a young child playing simple games like court and mendicot with his grandfather, he would get angry every time he forgot the cards that had already been played.“I start crying and say, what are you doing?” he recalled while chatting with TimesofIndia.com. What started as his frustration turned into something that his father saw as having a real shape.By half past six, Anshul had a bridge teacher. “At that time I like to sit at the top of the table to be at eye level with the cards,” he said.
Anshul Bhatt plays bridge (Special Arrangement)
At the age of seven, he played his first tournament, at the Indian Gymkhana, traveling in relative obscurity. The defendant at his table admitted that he was terrified at the thought of losing his seven-year-old son.A year later, the Bridge Federation of India selected him for the Under-16 category, making him the youngest player at the World Youth Bridge Championship in Lyon, France, in 2017, where he won the Joan Gerard Award for the most promising young talent.When the COVID-19 pandemic brought the entire world to a standstill, Anshul focused on improving his skills. “It was 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 hard,” he added.
A 20-minute call is Sachin Tendulkar
Somewhere in the midst of all this, the 2022 Under-16 World Championship in Italy, where Anshul won all the gold medals awarded to him, he got a call from Sachin Tendulkar. The two spoke for about 20 minutes.“I remember the conversation like it was yesterday, and I was shaking,” Anshul told the site. He asked Tendulkar the question every young athlete eventually asks: how do you handle other people’s expectations?
Anshul Bhatt with Sachin Tendulkar (Special Arrangement)
Tendulkar replied. “Anshul, if people don’t expect things from you, I think you should take a long look in the mirror, and check if what you’re doing is right. Are you sure you’re playing the right game?” the cricket picture told him.It has been with him ever since.“Now I see expectations as a good thing,” Anshul said. “It means that people believe in me and think I can deliver, and all I have to do is try to meet them.”
Above the game
What separates Anshul from being a talented young player is what he has chosen to do in the middle age of competitions. He has personally trained more than 500 children across India, running boot camps in schools and various companies.He has developed his own philosophy of teaching, teaching to split the gap, forcing what would take ten weeks into a day and a half, teaching each concept through the hand that demonstrates it, and then reinforcing it with the next.And it’s working. Of the 50 students who were in his first boot camp of 2023, six played in the World Cup in 2024, and two became the second Indian duo to reach the final of the Under-16 duo, following Anshul and his partner in 2019.This year, six of his former students have been selected for the India Under-16 and Under-21 squads. He still instructs them.Anshul’s idea of ​​a well-planned, less-than-many problem-solving approach was not limited to the card table. Using the fact that his grandfather has a mental disorder, he conducted a study investigating the effects of bridge on the cognition of adults, teaching the game in two nursing homes in Mumbai and working with the head of psychiatry at the BMC hospital, promising preliminary findings on working memory.
Anshul Bhatt built the PawPath project (Special Arrangements)
On his own, he, an alumnus of the Dhirubhai Ambani International School, built PawPath, a low-cost wearing system that uses walking sensors and machines to learn to analyze canine gait for orthopedic and neurological diseases, collecting data from more than 300 dogs across rescue centers and veterinary hospitals, including the largest in the world, Gugurat animal rescue Jamnagar, Vantaraja animal rescue center.The project won the Second Grand Prize in Animal Science at the 2025 Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair in the US, and Anshul presented it at the India AI Summit in Nice and at Mumbai Tech Week. Those same mathematical skills have led him to Stanford, where he is studying Biomechanical Engineering.However, he is careful to separate his ambitions from his passion for the sport. “I don’t want to play bridge professionally. I want to be a world champion,” he said. “I want to try and win all the important events but not be a professional.”
India’s time to watch the game
In all his interest, Anshul is well aware of where Indian bridge stands, and it is nowhere near the podium in the open group, behind the United States, Israel, China, and a group of Scandinavian countries where bridge is often taught as part of the school curriculum.What is lacking, in his opinion, is not skill; and one moment of connection. “I think bridge also needs a big win, like Anand’s win changed chess,” he said. “Something like that on the bridge would be nice.”ALSO READ: India’s record holder Tejas Nandakumar banned from 2026 Commonwealth Games: ‘Very disappointed’Whether it’s on the card table in China next month, or somewhere else, Anshul Bhatt has spent more than a decade building the case that the bridge should have shot chess two decades ago.They just need the rest of the world to start listening before they do what makes them tick.
