Meet Leon Luke Mendonca, the bespectacled smiling assassin of the 64 squares who plays violin

Indian Express

22-04-2025

In just 14 moves, Ian Nepomniachtchi was reduced to frowning at his pieces like they were refusing to obey his commands. Things had curdled pretty fast for the Russian on the board in round 3 of the Grenke Freestyle Chess Open 2025. A few moves later, Nepo was pushed past the point of no return. On move 36, he resigned. Against a player who had over 100 rating points less than him. In the next round, it was Hungarian grandmaster Richard Rapport's turn to endure punishment, and then heartbreak in the form of defeat.
The player who had made two of the world's top chess players roll over in back-to-back games was a 19-year-old grandmaster from India. Not one of the usual suspects of Gukesh, Praggnanandhaa and Arjun Erigaisi. The boy making heads turn at the Grenke Freestyle event over nine rounds was Leon Luke Mendonca, who is contemporary of the Gukesh-Praggnanandhaa-Arjun Erigaisi vintage, and was playing in his first event in freestyle chess — a variant of the sport that has been called by many practitioners as a completely different sport than plan ol' regular chess.
With Leon's rating at 2643, six of the nine players he faced in Karlsruhe were rated higher than him. Despite that, in those six games against higher-rated rivals, Leon had two wins over Nepo and Rapport besides three draws against elite grandmasters like Alexey Sarana, Wesley So and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave. At an event where he was 32nd in terms of ratings, he ended 10th in the final standings.
For the Goan prodigy, Karlsruhe has been a breakthrough event. The kind that makes the world sit up and take notice. He could have had this moment earlier this year: at the Tata Steel Masters in Wijk aan Zee; he had Vincent Keymer on the mat in the first round before a single blunder saw him lose. Shaken by that loss, Leon never recovered, ending 13th out of 14 players at Tata Steel with just one win.
But at Grenke Chess, the bespectacled boy with a constant smile on his face and a steady supply of Hawaiian shirts that would impress even Hikaru Nakamura, has enjoyed himself.
'This 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,' said Leon to the tournament's YouTube handle right after beating Nepo. 'It's my first time playing a freestyle chess tournament. I signed up immediately without any hesitation when I found out that there was an open tournament.'
The making of Mendonca
Many chess players who succeed have a one-dimensional approach to life: chess, and not much else. Not Leon though, who plays the violin so well that he joined the choir of a church in Budapest for a few months when he and his father, Lyndon, were stranded there as the world abruptly shut down due to the coronavirus pandemic in early 2020.
'Leon would play the violin and I'd play the guitar in the choir. Even though we were in Budapest for over a year during the pandemic, it was not that we really missed home. We were all alone initially, but we made friends who made us feel at home. Budapest became a second home for us,' Lyndon told The Indian Express earlier this year.
One of those friends included a French boy who played basketball with Leon every day ('Leon needs an hour of sweat,' said Lyndon). Another 'friend' was chess legend Judit Polgar.
Lyndon says that Leon is the kind of boy who never complains about anything. The father is a bit of the same. During the conversation he casually mentioned how Leon has had no sponsors for a while, but immediately dismissed it as not an issue with a casual, 'My wife and I put in all our savings. We chose this path because we always believed in letting our kids do what they love to do. We didn't have these choices in our time.'
Even while things were tough for both of them living abroad on a shoestring budget during the pandemic, not once did Leon grumble. Instead, he found other avenues to liven up the slow and dull COVID life. Like the violin. And basketball.
Having left Leon's regular violin back in India, Lyndon tracked down someone who was selling their old violin on the internet, and Leon ended up giving the boy a few chess lessons in exchange for his violin.
When Leon became a grandmaster in late 2020, Lyndon received a text message from Viswanathan Anand asking if his son would be open to getting chess lessons from him at his new academy, WACA.
'For me, that invitation was like when you go through a struggle, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. So, for me, this was light. This was like the greatest reward I could ever receive for all the sacrifices that we did: Anand himself inviting him to join his academy,' said Lyndon.