It will be a 12-hour gaming competition, and will have 200,000 chess enthusiasts competing for the top spots
Online gaming is at its peak in India and gamers are looking for more opportunities to test their skills. Gaming platforms, therefore, are leveraging this opportunity by coming up with more options.
Mobile Premier League (MPL), that started its service last year in September, launched a new game called MPL Chess Mahayudh on July 16.
The tournament, flagged off by chess Grandmaster Vishwanathan Anand, will begin on July 21.
It will be a 12-hour gaming competition which will have 200,000 chess enthusiasts competing for the top spots. And the pool prize for the tournament will be as high as Rs 10 lakh. The winner will get Rs 5 lakh.
Unlike the longer format, the tournament will have rounds of Speed Chess that will go on for only three minutes.
Ask Sai Srinivas Kiran G, co-founder and CEO of Mobile Premier League, whether a game of chess will have many takers in India, he says, “Chess is an ancient Indian game, and a household game at that in many parts of India. With over 2 lakh registrations in about a week, we think the facts speak for themselves when it comes to whether it would have many takers.”
Believing that real-time, multiplayer games are the future of digital gaming, MPL is expanding its game portfolio.
According to Sai, “No other major gaming company or platform is yet to adapt chess and host a tournament of the magnitude that MPL is doing with the Chess Mahayudh.”
Earlier this year, MPL had raised $35.5 million (approximately Rs 243 crore) and Sai Srinivas had said, “MPL would launch more and more different types of game format and focus on how quickly MPL can double down on its growth.”
He had also explained why mobile gaming is a big opportunity in India.
“The number of mobile gamers stand at 200 million and the number is expected to grow to 600 million in the next two-three years. There is no other market as big as India in the world in terms of number of users. Southeast Asia, which is at 150 million, is expected to grow to 350-400 million,” he had said.
