Team Apex Gaming are preparing their first move into chess, and almost everything about the teaser points to Vidit Gujrathi. On 7 November, the Indian organisation founded by Jonathan posted a 33-second video on X captioned “THE NATIONAL TREASURE HAS A NEW HOME!”, alongside a chess piece emoji and its #TAGonTOP hashtag.
TAG has not named the player, and Vidit has not commented publicly. Among India’s best-known grandmasters, however, he fits the brief more closely than anyone else, and he is not known to be signed to an esports organisation.
The video is built to give nothing away. It cuts between a wooden chessboard, close-ups of a hand holding a piece, a ring and a wristwatch, before fading to black without a face or a name. The Kick logo in the corner is not a clue in itself, because Kick has been TAG’s official live-streaming sponsor since September and appears across its content. Fans settled on Vidit almost immediately, and his account was tagged repeatedly in the replies as the post climbed towards 40,000 views.
Why Vidit Gujrathi fits TAG’s ‘national treasure’ teaser
On results alone, Vidit has one of the strongest records of any Indian player of his generation. He earned the grandmaster title in 2013 and won the FIDE Grand Swiss in 2023, which took him to the 2024 Candidates Tournament in Toronto. There, he beat Hikaru Nakamura in both of their games, shortly after reaching a career-high rating of 2747 and a world ranking of 14th. He has also won two Olympiad gold medals with India, captaining the team to a shared title online in 2020 before winning again in Budapest in 2024.
His appeal to an organisation like TAG goes well beyond the board, though. Vidit has built one of the biggest audiences in Indian chess through his streams and YouTube videos, which makes him a natural fit for a team that grew out of Jonathan’s own creator brand. His FIDE profile now lists a standard rating of 2693, but his public profile has kept growing, helped by a newer side of his career. His X bio now reads “Now also building AI things”, and NVIDIA sent him early access to its RTX Spark this week.
He has also made no secret of wanting a place in esports. Vidit reached the final of India Rising, the qualifier that JioBLAST and the Esports Foundation ran in India for the Esports World Cup 2026 chess event. In the Mumbai LAN final, he lost to Dutch grandmaster Benjamin Bok in an Armageddon decider, which meant he missed Paris altogether.
Where India’s top grandmasters already play in esports
The rest of the Indian market is already crowded. S8UL became the first Indian organisation to enter chess esports in April 2025, when it signed Aravindh Chithambaram and Nihal Sarin. By the Esports World Cup 2026 in August, S8UL had three of the four Indian players in Paris, with Pranesh M joining Nihal and Aravindh. The fourth was Arjun Erigaisi, who has played for the Korean organisation Gen.G since February 2025.
Paris also showed how hard it is to break through. The chess event offered a $1.5 million prize pool and $250,000 to the champion, but both Nihal and Arjun went out in their first playoff match, to Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura. Carlsen then went on to retain his title. With Arjun and Nihal already taken, and S8UL and GodLike both investing in the India Rising festival that hosted the chess final, Vidit is one of the most marketable Indian grandmasters still without an esports organisation.
What a chess signing would mean for Team Apex Gaming
For TAG, a grandmaster would mark another step away from its mobile esports roots. Jonathan launched the organisation on 12 April after leaving GodLike, and it started with BGMI before adding Free Fire, where its team is now competing at the Free Fire World Series. It has also signed major sponsors in quick succession, with Kick in September and Red Bull India in October. Jonathan himself passed 8 million YouTube subscribers this week.
A chess player would also give TAG a route into the Esports World Cup, where organisations earn Club Championship points across every title they enter. Vidit has not posted about TAG on X, and his pinned post is still the June launch of Kibitz, a model he built to predict human moves during chess broadcasts. TAG had not revealed the signing by Saturday evening, around eight hours after the teaser went live.
