Leon Mendonca, the Goan chess whiz known for Hawaiian shirts, attacking chess and appetite for big scalps

At the recently-concluded Grenke Freestyle Chess Open 2025, a new terror on the chess board emerged from India: 19-year-old Leon Luke Mendonca, who defeated players like Ian Nepomniachtchi and Richard Rapport and ground out draws against grandmasters like Alexey Sarana, Wesley So and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave. After the nine-round event ended on Monday in Karlsruhe, Leon was 10th in the standings out of 297 players. Of these, 31 players started the event with a better rating than the ever-smiling, bespectacled boy from Goa with a penchant for Hawaiian shirts and attacking chess.For Leon, who became India’s 67th grandmaster in 2020, moments under the bright arc lights on the global stage have been limited. His rise, after all, coincided with India discovering its golden generation with stars like world champion Gukesh, Praggnanandhaa and Arjun Erigaisi.
Unlike a Gukesh or a Pragg, who hail from chess-loving Chennai, Leon took his first steps in the sport in the small town of Saligao in Goa. But his rise is also testament to the fact that the sport is spreading fast in India, at outposts away from the traditional centres. Before Leon, Goa had one more grandmaster in the form of Anurag Mhamal.
Story continues below this ad

The Grenke Freestyle Chess Open was Leon’s second big-ticket event this year. He was part of the Tata Steel chess tournament in Wijk aan Zee earlier this year with the likes of Gukesh, Praggnanandhaa and Erigaisi. But that event had not gone as per plan with him winning just one game and finishing 13th out of 14 players.

The event in Grenke, though, saw him play some of his best chess and that too in the freestyle variant, which most elite players agree feels like a completely different sport than regular chess.
“It’s my first time playing a freestyle chess tournament. This freestyle variant is the best thing. I hope this is the future of chess. It kind of forces players to focus on their own skills rather than memorizing opening theory,” Leon told the tournament’s YouTube handle right after beating Nepomniachtchi.
Just to get a measure of how good Leon was at the Grenke Chess tournament, Nepomniachtchi held an advantage of 114 rating points on the Indian and was yet forced to resign in 36 moves in round 3. In the next round, Richard Rapport (rated 79 rating points ahead of Leon) was handed defeat in 35 moves. In his nine games, he lost just once to end as the second best placed Indian at Grenke, behind Erigaisi.Story continues below this ad
Leon’s first motivation to play the sport has echoes of Magnus Carlsen: they both wanted to beat their elder sers on the battlefield of 64 squares.
“His ser Beverly was first given a chess set as a gift, that’s when we sent her to a class to get coaching. She would then teach Leon, who was just around four or five at that time, what she had learnt at the class that day. That’s how he started,” father Lyndon told The Indian Express.
Even as his ser soon moved on to other pursuits, the boy was so enamoured the sport that he would often play against himself at home.
Back when he started to become good at the sport, Leon’s biggest challenge was getting top-quality coaching in Goa, said Lyndon. So father and son became journeymen, chasing elite chess knowledge around the country. They lived with Akash Thakur in Nagpur for a while, where his basics were strengthened. With online chess coaching still not a thing back in those days, there were also other stints with Rajesh Bahadur in Madhya Pradesh and Shashikant Kutwal in Pune.Story continues below this ad
“Because at some point, we realized that we had to move on (from Goa). So, we started going to neighboring states like Maharashtra, Karnataka and then Tamil Nadu,” said Lyndon.

Around 2015, when Leon started to show serious potential, they approached grandmaster RB Ramesh to be his coach. Ramesh has shaped the careers of many elite players like Praggnanandhaa, Vaishali and Aravindh Chitambaram. But it meant plenty of days spent in Chennai to learn at one of the country’s premier finishing institutes in chess: Ramesh’s Chess Gurukul.
Currently, Leon is being mentored Vishnu Prasanna, the man who shaped the career of Gukesh, who last year became the world’s youngest world champion in chess hory.
Leon also benefitted from being part of the first cohort of students at the Westbridge Anand Chess Academy, started five-time world champion Viswanathan Anand.Story continues below this ad
Lyndon said that what makes his son unique is that he never really complains about anything: no fuss about hotel rooms, no hissy fit over hectic travel itineraries, no rants about arbiters or tournament organisers. To illustrate this, he gives the example of the time both of them were stranded in Budapest for many months when the world shut down abruptly due to the coronavirus pandemic. Instead of going stir-crazy at being caught in a foreign land in one of the most uncertain times in living memory, Leon, accompanied his father, chased his goals on the chess board, claiming the three norms that one needs to become a grandmaster during the pandemic in the chess-revering cities.
“Raising Leon has always been a pleasure for me because he is very dedicated to whatever he does. He has come up the hard way. But with him, there are never any complaints. So, we never had issues even in those uncertain times, be it food or accommodation,” said Lyndon who said that Leon even joined a church choir in Budapest with a second-hand violin that he had arranged for in exchange for giving the previous owner chess lessons.