Paritosh lost his last two Puyo Puyo matches and still made the Asian Games quarter-finals
India’s only Puyo Puyo Champions player finished third in his group in Aichi, and plays South Korea’s Kang Dongshin for a semi-final place on Saturday.
Sep 25, 2026
Paritosh lost his last two group games at the Asian Games on Thursday, the second of them 3-2, and still made the knockout rounds. The debutant from Rohtak is India’s only player in Puyo Puyo Champions, and on Saturday he plays South Korea’s Kang Dongshin in the quarter-finals at the Aichi Sky Expo in Tokoname.
Two wins were enough
Group B was played in a single day, four best-of-five matches for each player, with the first to three games taking the match. Paritosh started well. He swept Mongolia’s Munkhzorig Ganbold 3-0 and then edged Singapore’s Mun June Justin Koh 3-2.
The afternoon was harder. Chinese Taipei’s Tzu-ang Kuo beat him 3-0, and Thailand’s Tanarak Wongkitikun won a deciding fifth game to take their match 3-2. That left Paritosh on two wins and two defeats, which was good enough for third place in the group and a spot in the last eight.
Kang is a step up. He finished second in Group A after beating Kazakhstan’s Alexandr Pivovarov and Hong Kong’s Yu Wing Lim 3-0 each, then the Philippines’ Karl Gonzalvo 3-2. His one defeat was 3-1 to Japan’s Yuki Kurihara, an 11-year-old who won all four of his group matches and could become the youngest medallist in Asian Games history.
A falling-blocks game at a multi-sport event
For anyone who has not come across it, Puyo Puyo is a Sega puzzle game in which coloured blobs drop into a well. Match four of the same colour and they pop, and the trick is to set up chains, so that one pop drops the next set into place and sends a pile of junk blocks across to the opponent’s side. It is closer to Tetris than to anything most Indian esports fans play, and it is one of 11 medal events in the esports programme in Aichi-Nagoya.
Paritosh got here through the national qualifiers. He came through the lower bracket at NESC 2026, and one of the players he beat on the way was Tirth Mehta, who won a Hearthstone bronze for India when esports was a demonstration event at the 2018 Asian Games.
eFootball is already over for India
India entered four titles in Aichi, with 15 players in all. The eFootball pair of Chinmay Sahoo and Danial Patel are already out. They drew 0-0 with Uzbekistan and got a walkover against Mongolia, but only the group winners went through and Uzbekistan topped it.
The Puyo Puyo knockout rounds are single elimination, and the quarter-finals, semi-finals and medal matches are all on Saturday, so Paritosh could play three times in a day. Two wins would put him in the gold medal match. Indian viewers can follow the event on Sony Liv and the Sony Sports network.