14-Year-Old Ethan Vaz Becomes India's 96th Chess Grandmaster

Late on Saturday night, India added one more grandmaster to its ranks when 14-year-old Ethan Vaz earned his third and final grandmaster norm at a tournament in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The event, called Chess Summer in Sarajevo – GM Mix, saw Vaz achieve the required performance rating to secure the title.

By becoming a grandmaster at the age of 14, Vaz joins an elite group of players who reached this milestone early in life. This list includes world champion Gukesh Dommaraju, world championship challenger Javokhir Sindarov, five-time world champion Magnus Carlsen, and many of India's golden generation stars such as Praggnanandhaa, Arjun Erigaisi, Nihal Sarin, Raunak Sadhwani, Bharath Subramaniyam, and Aryan Chopra.

Unlike many others on the list who earned their three grandmaster norms by playing regularly in overseas tournaments, Vaz's norms were obtained during rare trips abroad. Due to financial constraints, until 2023, Vaz did not travel to foreign tournaments unless he was representing India in Asian, Commonwealth, or World events. It was only in 2023 that the Goan boy began playing in open tournaments abroad, and his career progressed rapidly. He became a FIDE Master that year, an International Master in 2024, and now a Grandmaster.

“We have taken his career ahead slowly because for the initial five years, when his peers used to go overseas and play tournaments to increase their rating, we only could dream of doing it someday. For five years, we never took him overseas, other than the opportunities to represent India and win medals for the country,” Ethan's father Edwin told The Indian Express from Sarajevo. “So what makes him different is that unlike most other Indians, he's built his strength playing in tournaments in India.”

Vaz's journey has been unique. Prodigies with promise struggling to land sponsors is a common theme in Indian chess. The families of Mayank Chakraborty and Aronyak Ghosh, India's 94th and 95th grandmasters before Vaz, faced financial struggles, with one family needing to sell ancestral land and pawn family jewellery just to support their child's quest to become a grandmaster.

The Vaz family tried a different path: crowdfunding. Since 2022, the family has used crowdfunding to raise funds. The idea was suggested by family friends living abroad who had seen other athletes use this method. While Edwin was not keen initially, eventually he agreed. In the first year, about 44 donors contributed, with amounts ranging from hundreds to over one lakh rupees.

“The crowdfunding did not get us far because I just restricted it to our friends. After the first year, I stopped asking. But there were some people who would come on their own every year and say, 'it's time for my contribution'. That was so heartening. The emotional support was priceless,” says Edwin.

Edwin says that while they received funding from benefactors like Geno Foundation, Viswanathan Anand-backed Group e4, Quantbox, and ChessBase India's HelpChess Foundation, most of the costs for sustaining his son's career have come from their savings, which was also their retirement corpus.

Vaz's path to chess began under unusual circumstances. His parents, both software professionals, had been living in Japan for over seven years when the tsunami hit Japan in March 2011, leading to the Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown. His father Edwin was fluent in Japanese by then, and the family was even looking to buy a house in Tokyo. His mother Linda was pregnant with Ethan at the time. When the tsunami triggered the nuclear meltdown, making the environment radioactive, Edwin decided the young family had to leave.

“The tsunami itself did not affect us. But the nuclear reactor meltdown afterwards made everything radioactive. So there was a huge health risk in staying there. But maybe, it's God's way of bringing us here,” Edwin said. The family returned to India, and Ethan later took up chess, eventually becoming a grandmaster.