01. The Genesis of G3 Chess

My name is Roy Prasad, and I am the inventor of G3 Chess. I am originally from India and I came to the USA in 1979 for higher studies, and settled down here. I am an electronics engineer by training and I worked mostly in the semiconductor and design automation software industry.

I was one of the millions school kids who were caught in the chess vortex created by the 1972 Fischer-Spassky match. I was 17 then, and during the match, I learned the moves of the game from a neighbor. Although I had no comprehension of the level of play in this match, I was hooked on chess, and became a student of the game.

In 1973, I joined a local club in Bangalore and won their annual chess tournament. In 1974, when I was a student at the Indian Institute of Science, I won the Karnataka State Juniors’ championship held in Bangalore, ahead of many other kids who had been playing the game for a decade or longer. In 1976 I represented the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay in the all-India inter-collegiate chess tournament, playing on second board. IIT-Bombay won the third prize, a mere half point behind Bombay University and one point behind the winner Madras (Chennai) University.

By then, chess had started taking up way too much of my time. I had a great desire to become a grandmaster and I was tempted to become a chess professional, but having started chess very late in life at the age of 17, I decided I was not on the right trajectory for building a career in chess. So in 1979, when I went over to the USA for grad school, I pretty much gave up chess.

Even though I quit playing the game, I continued to follow top level chess, and I also thought extensively about how to make it possible for a player to simply walk into a tournament and play chess, without having to devote countless hours to studying all the latest theory and opening variations. Could there be a way to simply play the game over the board?

That line of thinking led me to formulate the concepts of G3 Chess some 25 years ago. I did not do anything with it, in part because I was very busy with my work, and also, I didn’t know if there was really a need for it. But looking at the state of competitive chess today, I have decided it is time for me to make my idea a reality.

I am now in the process of adding some finishing touches and creating a software app that people can use to play G3 Chess. I hope to have this available in the next 12-18 months. Stay tuned!