Some apps start with a business plan. This one started at a hospital bedside, during the two hardest months of a father's life and somehow turned into a full chess training platform, built entirely alone. No investors, no team, no roadmap meeting. Just a Grandmaster with a decade of coaching instinct and a decision to teach himself to code fast enough to keep up with his own ideas.
A Grandmaster With a Second Career Already Built In
Pandian's chess journey needs little introduction in Indian circles. He became a GM alongside a young Gukesh, both crossing the finish line for the title around the same period: Pandian as the 57th Indian Grandmaster, Gukesh the 60th. "I would say 50 per cent goes to his dad," Pandian says of Gukesh's rise, describing a training group in 2016–17 that also included Aditya Mittal, Pranav, Harshita, and Savitha Shri, several of whom have since become titled players in their own right.
Chess runs in the family too. His wife, S. Harini, is a WIM-elect and Woman FIDE Master, and both of their children, a 10-year-old son and a 7-year-old daughter, already play competitively; last year the whole family competed together at the Queenstar Open in Sri Lanka.
By his own account, Pandian's coaching career had already begun to change shape well before ChessAura existed. After the pandemic, he scaled back one-on-one hourly sessions in favour of occasional camps, partly because the economics weren't working for families. "Coaching expenses became a burden for many parents," he explains, "and they start expecting results faster, or they are getting frustrated." He had long wanted to build something that could reach far more players than individual coaching ever could, maybe an app or website, but says earlier attempts never felt right. "I myself don't like the output... if it's not helping me, it's no way going to help anyone."
The Accident That Changed Everything
What actually got ChessAura built wasn't a business plan. It was a family crisis. In January 2026, Pandian's son was injured in an accident at their apartment while playing with other children. He spent two months in the hospital, including time in the ICU, before making a full recovery. For Pandian, those weeks reordered everything. "Being at the hospital every day, your perception changes," Pandian says. "Before, whatever I thought was life, now nothing made sense. I couldn't go back to my routine... my energies were trying to find a way."
Unable to travel or coach in person, he began building it: first in small pieces, from the hospital itself. "The app was a consequence of my energies finding its path," he says. "It was organic. Everything felt organic. I didn't plan it."
One Person, Every Layer of the Stack
Pandian's IT background includes a B.Tech in IT plus five years maintaining server infrastructure for the Railways' accounts department with his sports-quota government job. It turned out to matter as much as his chess résumé. ChessAura has been built solo: frontend, backend, databases, authentication, payments, app-store compliance, chess engine integration, testing, and deployment, all handled by one Grandmaster with a coding habit. "There were definitely moments when I wondered whether I was taking on too much," he admits, but draws a direct line between the two disciplines he knows best: "Chess has taught me to be patient with difficult positions, and building software is sometimes very similar. You try something, it doesn't work, you find the mistake, you analyse it and try again."
What's Actually Inside the App
Pandian frames three things as non-negotiable for any player trying to reach GM-level calculation, opening awareness, and "flow", and has built ChessAura's core sections around them:
Training Positions, drawn from real practical games rather than constructed puzzles, with a Train Mode that plays automatically when you find the correct continuation.
Opening Ideas, focused not on memorising long theoretical lines but on spotting the one idea a trending course or repertoire missed, engine-checked using cloud Stockfish.
GM Study Library, refreshed with strong classical games every Tuesday, alongside an "Energy Games" section built around games with emotional or aesthetic impact like the kind that put players "in full form."
Opponent Preparation: Strips out noisy online games to reveal classical-only patterns, colour splits, and opening trees spanning the last three to four years.
ChessAura AI: A sparring partner designed for testing arbitrary positions across different time controls.
Game Analysis: Provides engine review of a player's own games.
Live Games Feed: A genuinely native feed from Pandian's own server that tracks tournaments around the clock, paired with a Weekly Highlights reel featuring curated blunders, critical moments, and GM commentary.
World Calendar: Scraped data from roughly 15 chess-event sites.
Tagged Saved Games: A feature directly suggested by GM R.B. Ramesh, coach of Praggnanandhaa.
Aura Rush: A fast-paced tactics mode that includes a leaderboard.
Private Opening Vault: A tool for managing large PGN repertoires.
That last feature has its own origin story. Gukesh himself asked Pandian for a way to check a roughly 30,000-line opening file on his phone while travelling, something that crashed most import tools built for far smaller files. Pandian's fix keeps large imports local to the user's device (synced to a laptop only for premium users, never uploaded elsewhere), and lets a big file take a few minutes to import once rather than freeze every time it's opened. "For chess players, we don't mind waiting while the movie is downloading from Netflix," he says, "but it should not hang while we watch the movie."
The Business of It
ChessAura offers a 7-day free trial with full access.
Premium subscribers can also use the full platform on the web at chessaura.com or chessaura. in, a deliberate option, Pandian notes, for parents who don't want to hand a phone to their kids but are fine with a laptop.
What Comes Next
Pandian is candid that ChessAura remains a one-person operation, and that its future scale depends on finding partners. "I've built ChessAura by myself so far, but I believe the potential is much bigger," he says. "With the right team, technology and funding, I want to take it from a chess app to a world-class training platform." For now, the app carries the imprint of a single Grandmaster's judgment on what actually helps players improve, assembled, by his own description, one feature at a time, the same way he'd approach a difficult position on the board.
Download the app here. (Android)
Download the app here. (iOS)
Check out the ChessAura website here.
