Nihal Sarin has played tens of thousands of speed chess games online, won multiple speed chess tournaments, pocketed prize money worth lakhs and has shown he can match any player in the world, move for move. Yet, one persistent obstacle holds back the 20-year-old Grandmaster from Kerala: the Internet network lag in India. “If you think about it, let’s say in a second, you can make like nine or 10 moves, which is essentially 0.1 seconds per move,” Nihal, a multiple-time Junior Speed Chess Champion, tells The Indian Express. “But the moment it takes even just 0.2 seconds, you can only make half of the moves all of a sudden. It does not sound like anything when you say 1 millisecond at first but it actually makes a huge difference effectively.” Nihal has played more than 51,000 speed and bullet games on chess.com, one of the most popular online gaming websites, alone. Two years ago, when he was barely 18, he secured second place in the chess.com Global Championship to take home $100,000, or nearly Rs 82 lakh. But being Nihal Sarin comes with its own challenges — especially when competing globally from India for reasons beyond his control. India generates over 2.1 million daily games on chess.com (10.5% of total traffic). However, players constantly grapple with network delays and lag issues. In live chess games, every millisecond counts for competitive players battling for big prize money or sharpening their skills in practice. For a player like Nihal, the frustration levels sometimes reach a point that he even thinks of moving out of India temporarily. When asked if the thought ever occurred to him, Nihal says, “Oh yes, very much. as a temporary solution, definitely.” But now, there could be a permanent solution around the corner: an expanding Realtime Chess Network (RCN) being developed by chess.com with one its servers located right here — in Mumbai. It was during the Covid-induced Online Olympiad that several high-profile Indian chess players realised how poor internet connections were hampering their games. The situation reached a point where India lost a match to lowly placed Mongolia. Later, a global outage where Cloudflare servers went down during the final, forced FIDE to award gold medals to both Russia and India — a decision criticised by many at the time. The incident led to a long-standing partnership between elite Indian players and Manu Gurtu, co-founder of MGD1, a Pune-based chess management firm representing top players. Gurtu was instrumental in assisting several players facing internet issues. “The problem is down to all the chess platforms players use to play online chess. Mainly, chess.com. All their servers are in the US, so anyone out in Asia, and away from US and Europe will have a larger lag,” he says. Understanding the difference between Internet connectivity issues and server-ping-related problems is the key. The real issue is latency — the delay in response during data transmission. And ping is the tool used to measure this latency. “There’s a technical term called the ‘ping’, and the ping from India (for players here) is much more, due to the sheer distance from physical servers. The US and European-based players are located much closer, so they don’t face this,” says Gurtu. In other words, when players make a move on their device, it travels through their local network to the router, then to the Internet Service Provider before reaching chess.com’s servers via the public internet. This complex routing makes it nearly impossible for platforms to eliminate lag. To address this very core problem, chess.com is developing the realtime network, which uses a distributed, multi-server architecture where servers are selected based on player locations. The newly built RCN is supported by four chess.com servers located in Virginia and Oregon (USA), the Netherlands and Mumbai — a significant upgrade from their previous single live server in Virginia. The RCN is in the process of expanding, which will sort out a part of the problem in the immediate future. “For Indian players overall, latency is improving. The average currently sits at about 315 milliseconds, but when Indian players connect to our Mumbai server in RCN-supported games, they experience an average latency of only 125 milliseconds,” says Rafal Skocelas, Technical Project Manager of chess.com. “That said, we can only optimise what's under our control. Factors like local device performance, home network setup, and ISP routing are beyond our reach, though we absolutely understand the frustration they can cause,” he says. Over the last five years, Internet connectivity has improved massively in India — it ranks 21 in mobile and 98 in fixed broadband connectivity as of March 2025 in the Speedtest Global Index conducted by Ookla. Rakesh Kulkarni, International Master and Director of chess.com India, has played a key role in the organisation’s decision to establish multiple servers worldwide by relaying feedback from elite Indian players to the global team. “I’ve been pushing this case from my side and (Grandmaster) Arjun Erigaisi recently told me things are better than before,” he says. (With Shivani Naik)
