Passport, visa, Rs 6–7 lakh worth of gear lost, stranded alone in Europe: Survival of 16-year-old Md Imran, India’s upcoming chess Grandmaster | Chess News

Survival story of 16-year-old Md Imran (Special Arrangements)

NEW DELHI: The bus pulled away just after 8 PM. Md Imran, hungry after eight hours on the road, had stepped off during a scheduled ten-minute stop in Bratislava, Slovakia, just looking for biscuits and coffee. He made it back to the platform in time and frantically waved for the driver to wait. The driver looked straight at him, scornfully waved from his seat, and drove away anyway.Everything Imran owned disappeared with that bus. His passport. His Schengen visa. His US student visa, the one meant to carry him to a scholarship at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) this fall. His phone, his power banks, his diary, close to Rs 6 – 7 lakh worth of gear. All of it rolling towards Budapest without him, on the night before a tournament he still had to play last June.At just 16, Imran was stranded alone in a foreign country. Thankfully, as it turns out, being alone in a foreign country was something he’d already had a decade of practice at.

A kid who was just watching TV

Imran didn’t start playing chess because anyone saw a prodigy in him. He started around the age of seven because his parents, in Kakinada, Andhra Pradesh, wanted him away from screens.“I think it was just introduced to me only to make me stay a bit away from all kinds of electronic devices, because I was consuming a lot of electronic media back then,” Imran told TimesofIndia. com during an exclusive interaction. “I was watching TV from morning till the night.”Chess was one of several activities his parents tried for him; skating, swimming, and gymnastics were others, but it was the one that stuck.

Md Imran (Special Arrangements)

He began beating everyone at his local academy under coach Leela Kumar, who first suggested he try tournaments. What followed was an explosion rather than a progression. In under a year, Imran gained roughly 900 rating points, jumping from 1035 to 1958.He was eyeing tournaments abroad and had lined up a sponsorship worth two to three lakh rupees to fund them. Then COVID hit. The sponsorship evaporated.“When we asked about the amount, they said that it’s not possible,” he recalled. “Even their contingencies have been worse, so they can’t produce that amount.”Chess, for two years, moved almost entirely online.When over-the-board tournaments resumed, Imran’s family had already been priced out of the version of this journey where an adult travels with him. Through 2023, he made occasional trips abroad with friends or his mother. Then, in June 2024, at 14, he started travelling completely alone.“The only reason why I was travelling alone and chose to travel alone is just because to reduce the cost,” he said plainly. “If I could have gotten one of my parents or a legal guardian… I have to pay for an additional person. We are not at all in that state.”

‘You realise very quickly the systems fail you’

What happened next reads less like a sports story and more like a survival account. Last month, Imran arrived in Budapest past midnight with nothing. The station was locked, so he couldn’t file a report. No hotel would take him without a physical passport, as European law requires it for check-in.He ran to drivers from other bus companies, begging for help. FlixBus chat support told him to file a complaint online.He had a phone. He was lucky for that much.“Usually, I don’t,” he said of travelling with a charged device. “I travel with two phones and two power banks, but luckily, I had stepped out with my main phone in my hand. That was my absolute lifeline.”“I filed a barrage of official complaints with both FlixBus and the authorities, but I haven’t received a shred of help,” Imran said. “The cold truth is that they have done absolutely nothing, and my conclusion is that they are completely unreliable.”For most people, this is the point where the story stops. For Imran, it was the starting line of the First Saturday Round Robin, a tournament he’d travelled to specifically to chase a Grandmaster norm. He had every reason to withdraw. He had a high fever. He had spent his mornings shuttling between police stations and the U.S. Embassy instead of preparing openings. He chose to play anyway.He finished 7/9, unbeaten, and claimed his first Grandmaster norm. Later, the second norm came with an identical 7/9 run at the 5th Rigo Janos Memorial.Three weeks earlier, he’d been rated 2460 with zero norms. He is now 2496, needing just one open norm to complete the title.

On the brink of becoming a Grandmaster

“I have never had real, consistent coaching,” he, who is now back in India after being issued a new passport, told this website. “I always felt like I was just wasting money on them, and they could never dedicate the proper time to me anyway. So, I decided to do everything alone.”He became an International Master alone in 2024. He crossed 2500 alone. Both GM norms came the same way, aside from brief, targeted help: a stretch with IM Radoslav Gajek between 2023 and 2025, and Levin Guy, an Israeli player rated 2473, who reached out after learning about the Bratislava incident and offered to second him for free.

Md Imran with his GM norm (Special Arrangements)

The volume behind the self-taught rise is staggering on its own. Roughly 257 rated games in 2024 and 283 in 2025, by his account, the highest of any player in the world that year.

“I would never recommend anyone to go this path,” he said. “I didn’t even have a single ideal resource which a player should have to even become an IM. I was contradicting every ideal way of improvement in chess.”Asked what he’d actually tell someone trying to follow his path anyway: “The only thing which you need is you have to believe in yourself,” he said. “If you believe in God, then of course you have to believe in God more than yourself. And after that, you have to believe in yourself. That’s it.”

A family of four, and a debt that predates the bus

Imran’s household is small against the scale of what it’s carried: his mother, a homemaker; his father, a police officer of 22 years now stationed in Visakhapatnam; and a younger brother, four years behind him.“We are not very sound financially or whatsoever,” Imran said. “I think we even have around 40, 50 lakh rupees of loan my father has taken just for the past two years.” The Bratislava losses simply stacked on top of it. “It’s nowhere better,” he said. “We are definitely under a lot of hardship even now after I’ve achieved these two norms.”