The King's Gambit: Markers chess players lay down on the road to glory

At the World Chess Championship final in Dubai last year, guests made token opening moves for the players, Magnus Carlsen and Ian Nepomniachtchi, during the photo opportunity before the start of each game. One of them was a teen chess prodigy from India, Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa. Little did anyone imagine then that less than three months later, the 16-year-old lad from Chennai would take a game off the five-time world champion, Carlsen, at a rapid chess tournament featuring 16 elite players.

A MILESTONE FOR THE YOUNGSTER

Carlsen finished second, behind Nepomniachtchi, in the preliminary stage of the Airthings Masters online tournament, while Praggnanandhaa, also known as Pragg, did not qualify for the knockout stage, finishing 11th. But it was still a huge milestone for the youngster to upstage the world champion he idolised through his formative years. Pragg was eight years old when Carlsen first became the world champion, defeating India’s five-time world champion, Viswanathan Anand, in Chennai in 2013. Now, he has become the youngest player to beat Carlsen in his long reign as world champion.

It wasn’t a fluke either.

Pragg has an attacking style of play, like his mentor and country cousin, Viswanathan Anand, who has been grooming him at the Westbridge Anand Chess Academy in Chennai. He had the upper hand in his very first encounter with Carlsen last year at the New in Chess Classic tournament. Twice he spurned the world champion’s repetitive moves for a draw to keep pressing for a win. But Carlsen finally held out for a draw in 80 moves with his characteristic rock-solid defensive play. “He certainly did not show me too much respect when we were playing. So, he clearly believes that he can compete at this level,” Carlsen prophesied after that game.

In the Airthings Masters game this week, Pragg was even more aggressive, conceding two pawns to gain attacking positions. The game followed a well-trodden path after Queen’s Gambit Declined until the 14th move. Vidit Gujrathi, India’s second-highest ranked player after Anand, had won a game from that position with a rook move last year. But Pragg moved his queen instead, taking the game into uncharted territory and also showing that he had studied the Gujrathi line. He then got into a winning position in the middle game but missed the opportunity.

But the teenager kept his composure to build a fresh attack and Carlsen cracked with a false move. The world champion tried to wriggle out but Pragg did not falter this time in executing the coup de grace.

FUTURE WORLD CHAMPION?

Even though three losses at the start of the tournament meant that Pragg could not qualify for the knockout stage, he took two more big scalps after defeating Carlsen — those of Russian grandmasters Vladislav Artemiev and Andrey Esipenko, who finished at three and four in the standings at the preliminary stage behind Nepo and Carlsen. Esipenko, 19, is another rising star, ranked 26 in the world.

Pragg is still a long way behind, but his feats at a tender age have prompted Anand to tip him as a future world champion. He was the youngest ever international master as a 10-year-old, and the second youngest ever to become a grandmaster four years back, although three others have attained that status at an even younger age since then.

Apart from having brains wired for it, chess prodigies are characterised by an early exposure to mastering the game. In Pragg’s case, it came when his elder sister, Vaishali, enrolled in a chess class. The six-year-old girl was hooked on cartoon films and her parents thought chess would wean her away from the screen. It worked twofold because the girl was soon playing chess at home with her toddler brother. Vaishali is an international master (IM) and woman grandmaster (WGM) now, and both the siblings were among the first five players chosen by Anand’s chess academy for fellowship programmes.

Like Pragg, Anand got an early start at home. “I started at the age of six. My elder brother and sister were dabbling a bit, and then I went to my mother and pestered her to teach me as well,” he recalled in an interview. His mother was a big fan of the game, and once Anand started beating his siblings, he joined a professional class and started playing competitively. He became India’s first GM at the age of 18, and the first player from outside the former Soviet Union to be crowned World Champion, after American GM Bobby Fischer.

YOUNGEST-EVER US CHESS CHAMP

Fischer became the youngest-ever US chess champion at the age of 14, but his prodigious talent was evident in the previous championship when he won the ‘brilliancy prize’ for beating IM Donald Byrne. Chess author Hans Kmoch called it “the game of the century” — “a stunning masterpiece of combination play performed by a boy of 13 against a formidable opponent, matching the finest on record in the history of chess prodigies.” Much later, in what was dubbed “the match of the century”, Fischer beat Boris Spassky in 1972 in Reykjavik, Iceland, for the world championship, at the height of the US-USSR cold war, breaching the Soviet dominance over the game and alleged manipulation of chess tournaments.

Like Anand, Fischer started playing chess at the age of six with his sister Joan and mother Regina after buying a chessboard in a candy store. Joan and Regina got tired of Fischer’s obsession with the game, but he continued on his own, getting hold of a book of old chess games to go deeper.

He also dropped out of school at the age of 16 as his chess mastery grew, thanks to the efforts of his mother to expand his opportunities to play and find mentors.

Fischer had many ups and downs with mental health issues and vanished from the scene after becoming the world champion, refusing to defend his title.

FISCHER’S RUSSIAN OPPONENT

His famous Russian opponent Boris Spassky was also a young prodigy in his time, beating world champion Mikhail Botvinnik when he was 10 years old. The story goes that Spassky learned chess on a train when he was five years old, during the family’s evacuation from Leningrad following the German siege of World War II. Botvinnik was instrumental in developing a coaching system to help Soviet players after the war, and his pupils included three world champions of later years — Anatoly Karpov, Garry Kasparov, and Vladimir Kramnik.

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Sumit Chakraberty is a writer based in Bengaluru. Write to him at chakraberty@gmail.com