Chess has survived 1,500 years almost untouched. Empires rose and fell, computers learned to beat grandmasters, and the world changed beyond recognition — but the board stayed the same 64 squares, the same 16 pieces. It took someone standing entirely outside the chess establishment to ask the question every purist had stopped asking: what if chess could be more?

That someone was Pradeep Sadani, a Kolkata real estate entrepreneur with no formal chess training. In 2012, watching a match with a familiar nagging feeling, the idea took hold — not to replace chess, but to expand it. What if the board had 100 squares instead of 64? What if there was a piece that had never existed in over a millennium of chess history?

“Chess has been played the same way for 1,500 years. The world has changed completely — technology, science, education — but chess is still on the same 64 squares. What if there was MORE?”

The early sketches were simple: a 10×10 grid, and a new piece — initially just called the Dynamo — powerful and unpredictable enough to force players into genuinely new thinking. A chance introduction through Shahid Ahmed of ChessBase India led to a meeting that would change everything: Grandmaster Dibyendu Barua, India’s second-ever Grandmaster, agreed to test the idea.

“When I first heard about this idea, I was skeptical. But when I sat down and actually looked at it, I realized this person was onto something genuinely new.”

GM Dibyendu Barua

What followed was three years of testing at Barua Chess Academy — hundreds of games, countless rule revisions — before Dynamo Chess launched publicly on 23rd March 2015 at ICCR Kolkata. Today, it’s a registered startup, an Android app, a physical product line, and a growing tournament ecosystem. But it started with one outsider’s refusal to accept that even the most perfect game couldn’t be improved.

“The best move is not the one your teacher showed you. The best move is the one only you could see.”

Pradeep Sadani