Nihal Sarin has performed tens of 1000’s of pace chess video games on-line, gained a number of pace chess tournaments, pocketed prize cash value lakhs and has proven he can match any participant on the planet, transfer for transfer. But, one persistent impediment holds again the 20-year-old Grandmaster from Kerala: the Web community lag in India.
“If you concentrate on it, let’s say in a second, you can also make like 9 or 10 strikes, which is actually 0.1 seconds per transfer,” Sarin, a multiple-time Junior Pace Chess Champion, tells The Indian Categorical. “However the second it takes even simply 0.2 seconds, you possibly can solely make half of the strikes hastily. It doesn’t sound like something if you say 1 millisecond at first but it surely really makes an enormous distinction successfully.”
Sarin has performed greater than 51,000 pace and bullet video games on chess.com, one of the in style on-line gaming web sites, alone. Two years in the past, when he was barely 18, he secured second place within the chess.com International Championship to take dwelling $100,000, or almost Rs 82 lakh.
However being Nihal Sarin comes with its personal challenges — particularly when competing globally from India for causes past his management. India generates over 2.1 million day by day video games on chess.com (10.5% of whole visitors). Nevertheless, gamers continuously grapple with community delays and lag points.
In reside chess video games, each millisecond counts for aggressive gamers battling for large prize cash or sharpening their abilities in apply. For a participant like Sarin, the frustration ranges typically attain some extent that he even thinks of transferring out of India briefly. When requested if the thought ever occurred to him, Sarin says, “Oh sure, very a lot… as a short lived answer, undoubtedly.”
However now, there might be a everlasting answer across the nook: an increasing Realtime Chess Community (RCN) being developed by chess.com with one its servers positioned proper right here — in Mumbai.
It was throughout the Covid-induced On-line Olympiad that a number of high-profile Indian chess gamers realised how poor web connections had been hampering their video games. The state of affairs reached some extent the place India misplaced a match to lowly positioned Mongolia. Later, a world outage the place Cloudflare servers went down throughout the remaining, compelled FIDE to award gold medals to each Russia and India — a choice criticised by many on the time.
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The incident led to a long-standing partnership between elite Indian gamers and Manu Gurtu, co-founder of MGD1, a Pune-based chess administration agency representing prime gamers. Gurtu was instrumental in aiding a number of gamers going through web points. “The issue is all the way down to all of the chess platforms gamers use to play on-line chess. Primarily, chess.com. All their servers are within the US, so anybody out in Asia, and away from US and Europe could have a bigger lag,” he says.
Understanding the distinction between Web connectivity points and server-ping-related issues is the important thing. The actual situation is latency — the delay in response throughout knowledge transmission. And ping is the software used to measure this latency.
“There’s a technical time period known as the ‘ping’, and the ping from India (for gamers right here) is far more, because of the sheer distance from bodily servers. The US and European-based gamers are positioned a lot nearer, in order that they don’t face this,” says Gurtu.
In different phrases, when gamers make a transfer on their gadget, it travels by means of their native community to the router, then to the Web Service Supplier earlier than reaching chess.com’s servers by way of the general public web. This complicated routing makes it almost unimaginable for platforms to eradicate lag.
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To deal with this very core drawback, chess.com is growing the realtime community, which makes use of a distributed, multi-server structure the place servers are chosen primarily based on participant places. The newly constructed RCN is supported by 4 chess.com servers positioned in Virginia and Oregon (USA), the Netherlands and Mumbai — a major improve from their earlier single reside server in Virginia. The RCN is within the strategy of increasing, which is able to kind out part of the issue within the instant future.
“For Indian gamers total, latency is bettering. The typical at present sits at about 315 milliseconds, however when Indian gamers hook up with our Mumbai server in RCN-supported video games, they expertise a mean latency of solely 125 milliseconds,” says Rafal Skocelas, Technical Undertaking Supervisor of chess.com.
“That stated, we are able to solely optimise what’s below our management. Elements like native gadget efficiency, dwelling community setup, and ISP routing are past our attain, although we completely perceive the frustration they will trigger,” he says.
During the last 5 years, Web connectivity has improved massively in India — it ranks 21 in cellular and 98 in fastened broadband connectivity as of March 2025 within the Speedtest International Index performed by Ookla.
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Rakesh Kulkarni, Worldwide Grasp and Director of chess.com India, has performed a key function within the organisation’s choice to ascertain a number of servers worldwide by relaying suggestions from elite Indian gamers to the worldwide crew. “I’ve been pushing this case from my facet and (Grandmaster) Arjun Erigaisi not too long ago instructed me issues are higher than earlier than,” he says. (With Shivani Naik)