ChessBase India Hits 3 Million YouTube Subscribers

ChessBase India crossed 3 million subscribers on YouTube on July 26, 2026, becoming just the third chess channel in the platform’s history to reach that number, following Gotham Chess and Hikaru Nakamura. For a channel that began with a single interview a little over a decade ago, the milestone is the latest chapter in one of the more remarkable growth stories in chess media — and one that has tracked almost exactly alongside India’s own rise as a global chess powerhouse.

How It All Started

The channel’s very first upload was an interview with Nihal Sarin, posted on December 1, 2015, at a time when Sarin himself was still a promising junior rather than the elite grandmaster he’d go on to become. ChessBase India was founded that year by International Master Sagar Shah and his wife, Woman International Master Amruta Mokal, a husband-and-wife team who had been fixtures of the Indian chess scene for years before starting the channel.

The origin story goes back further, to 2014, when Shah and Mokal traveled to Hamburg, Germany, and visited the headquarters of ChessBase GmbH, the world’s leading chess software company, at the invitation of co-founder Frederic Friedel. Seeing a dedicated team working full-time on chess content left an impression on the couple — Mokal is said to have remarked that she wished such a company existed in India. That visit planted the seed for what would become ChessBase India, officially incorporated on January 18, 2016, as a licensed regional partner bringing ChessBase’s products and coverage model to South Asia.

Shah’s own chess resume made him an unusual fit for the role of full-time content creator. He earned his International Master title in 2014, holds two Grandmaster norms, and reached a peak FIDE rating of 2468 — all while training as a Chartered Accountant, making him the first CA in India to also hold the IM title. At the time the channel launched, Shah’s own playing career was near its peak, and he made the deliberate choice to step back from competitive chess to build ChessBase India full-time instead.

A Nomadic Bet on Chess Journalism

The channel’s early growth wasn’t built from a studio — it was built on the road. In November 2017, Shah and Mokal gave up their rented apartment in Mumbai and spent a full year traveling across India with no fixed home, visiting tournaments, clubs, and chess communities in city after city to build relationships and generate content. It was an unusual, high-commitment bet on a sport that, at the time, had nowhere near the mainstream visibility it enjoys in India today.

That early, close-to-the-ground coverage style became something of a hallmark for the channel — interviews conducted late at night immediately after a young player’s tournament game, detailed post-game analysis delivered within hours rather than days, and a consistent focus on India’s rising junior talent well before most of that talent became internationally famous.

A Decade of Milestones

The channel’s subscriber growth followed a steadily escalating curve. It crossed 300,000 subscribers back in 2020, helped along by viral clips featuring Indian stars like Viswanathan Anand and a young Praggnanandhaa. Two years later, on August 28, 2022, it reached 1 million subscribers, becoming the fifth chess channel on YouTube to hit that mark, behind Agadmator, GothamChess, Hikaru Nakamura, and Chess Talk.

The following year brought an even bigger milestone: on August 1, 2023, ChessBase India became the second chess channel ever to hit 1 billion total views, trailing only GothamChess, which had reached the mark five months earlier. That scale of viewership has been driven partly by a handful of standout videos — a clip of Magnus Carlsen offering Vidit Gujrathi an early draw due to a stomach bug alone has racked up more than 27 million views, while early footage of Praggnanandhaa’s blitz encounters with Anand also became unlikely viral hits.

Reaching 3 Million

Since crossing the billion-view mark, the channel has continued adding subscribers at a rapid pace, moving from roughly 1.07 million in early 2023 to 2.9 million by mid-2026, before finally crossing the 3 million threshold this week. Along the way, the operation has expanded well beyond a single English-language channel, adding dedicated Hindi, Gujarati, and Marathi channels alongside a separate clips channel, allowing it to reach audiences across India’s many linguistic communities rather than just its English-speaking chess fans.

The channel’s output has scaled dramatically to match that growth. In just one twelve-month stretch between January 2022 and January 2023, the ChessBase India team published a combined 3,822 videos across all its channels and formats — an average of more than ten videos a day — a volume of output that would be unusual even for a large newsroom, let alone a team built around a single sport.

To mark the 3 million milestone, the channel shared a graphic collage celebrating the full team behind the operation: the editors, presenters, reporters, and support staff whose accumulated work over the past decade has gone into building it into what it is today.

More Than Just a YouTube Channel

ChessBase India’s ambitions have never been limited to video content alone. The company has also worked to make ChessBase’s own software more accessible and affordably priced across South Asia, distributes chess books from major international publishers within India, and has increasingly used its platform to spotlight grassroots chess development work — including initiatives aimed at bringing more girls into the game in regions where access to organized chess has historically been limited.

Shah’s own reporting has also continued to shape how Indian chess stories reach a global audience, with recent features covering figures ranging from the coaches behind rising stars like Javokhir Sindarov and Vaishali Rameshbabu, to profiles of young international prodigies making waves outside India entirely.

Why This Milestone Matters

ChessBase India’s growth has unfolded over almost exactly the same decade that produced World Champion Gukesh Dommaraju, world number two Arjun Erigaisi, and a deep wave of young Indian grandmasters coming up behind them. The channel’s early bet on covering Indian junior talent closely, long before that talent became global headline news, looks in hindsight like one of the more prescient content strategies in modern chess media.

With the sport’s global audience continuing to grow through streaming and online platforms, ChessBase India’s milestone also stands as a reminder of how much of that growth has come from outside the English-language, Western-centric chess media that once dominated coverage of the sport — and how a small team built around a marriage, a shared passion, and a year spent with no fixed address ended up building one of the most-watched chess platforms in the world.