R. Praggnanandhaa vs Magnus Carlsen: Mind games, embracing the chaos and the Indian wave

Pragg’s rise is an outcome of the changes he has made to his game in the last one-and-a-half years or so. (Illustration by Suneesh K.)

In the end, we came close to a fairy-tale ending but not close enough. Even as the live feed crashed under the weight of over 150,000 people watching – an Eden Gardens stadium-worth of fans distributed across the globe – 18-year-old Grandmaster Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa went down to Magnus Carlsen in the final of the FIDE Chess World Cup. “Pragg” as he is universally known, had disposed of the world No. 3 and then No. 2 in preceding tiebreakers. Could he now dethrone the final boss of the game? It was not to be as, in a complicated Italian Game, even as Pragg tried crashing through, Carlsen defended precisely and was able to counterattack with his knights.

The mini-match had begun with lots of drama. “It’s all about mindgames,” declaimed Grandmaster Peter Leko, as game one of the finals was about to start. Praggnanandhaa had arrived early and was waiting at the table, like a young kid in the examination hall waiting for the question paper to be handed out. In the background the digital clock counted down the moments to lift-off. The world No. 1 Carlsen nonchalantly arrived exactly one second before zero flashed on the screen. It was an epic matchup of the generations - Carlsen was already a Grandmaster when Pragg was born.

Even after Pragg made his first move, Carlsen took his time, adjusting his pieces, flicking away non-existing dust on the board and writing down the move carefully in the scoresheet. He was making Pragg wait. Building on the tension he knew his young opponent would be feeling.

And that is what caused GM Leko, who was commentating, to exclaim at this fascinating spectacle. However, as the game unfolded it was clear that Pragg, who essayed the English opening, knew its wrinkles and folds. Grandmaster Naroditsky, who was the other commentator, was all praise - when the high-tension encounter ended in a draw, he would say that it was a game filled with “teachable moments” and pointed to Pragg’s style, a “uniquely mature universality”.

Such accolades bear testament to Pragg’s rise; now ranked world No. 20, he is knocking on the doors of a very exclusive club.
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Pragg’s rise is an outcome of the changes he has made to his game in the last one-and-a-half years or so. It all began in the windswept coastal town of Wijk aan Zee, home of the Tata Steel tournament, dubbed as the “Wimbledon” of chess, in 2022.

The lockdown had meant chess had shifted online to fast and furious blitz matches played at odd hours through the night. If that was the equivalent of the IPL, then Tata Steel was like Test cricket, where every deficiency, every technical flaw would be glaringly shown up. His long-time coach, and head of the Gurukul academy in Chennai, G.M. Ramesh explains how actually sitting at the board makes a world of difference, explaining that “when you play direct, face-to-face chess” then “compared to online, the tension, the pressure is intense”. This was Pragg’s first tango with the “beasts”, the players who are rated above 2700 in the Elo ranking system and often dubbed as super-grandmasters. Ramesh, who accompanied Pragg, recalls, “Tata steel was a very important tournament in Pragg’s career because it was the first time he was playing in a standard time control, over the board, against so many 2700, 2750+ players including Carlsen.”

Till then, Pragg had been rampaging against strong players but not the very top. Ramesh explains the difference between them and the elite, “The pressure these guys put on their opponents is immense, and move to move, it is a never-relenting pressure. When (Pragg) plays with 2600s or lower rated players, they don’t put so much pressure in every game, so there will always be some small slips here and there but with these guys it rarely happens, they are constantly, relentlessly going after you. So you need to be at your peak shape in every move throughout the tournament, round after round”.

Even as the tournament started, disaster struck – Ramesh came down with COVID. He had to move into a separate room and stay in quarantine for 10 days. Pragg was alone for the first time in his career – till then either his mother or a coach had always accompanied him – and even had to make his favourite sambar-rice all by himself.

I think especially he sort of gravitates towards chaos. I don’t know if it is by desire or it simply happens, but quite often he goes for very, very tactical positions.

- Viswanathan Anand

Wijk in winter is a lonely place. The wind sweeps in from the North Sea, and a sea mist can shroud everything, turning the village into a Gothic landscape of desolation.

Ramesh takes up the tale, “he had to go to the venue and come back alone... and when he comes back after the game it’ll be like 7pm or 8pm, it is completely dark and he has to come walking alone and there is a cemetery along the way, and he was pretty scared and he had to do it alone”.

Pragg soon conquered his spectral fears, and by the end went through the baptism of fire, scoring a respectable 5.5 points out of 13. By this time, Viswanathan Anand, through the aegis of the WestBridge Anand Chess Academy (WACA) which had started operations the previous year, was also sending in his inputs.

Anand, was struck by Pragg’s style, saying, “I think especially he sort of gravitates towards chaos. I don’t know if it is by desire or it simply happens, but quite often he goes for very, very tactical positions”. Does this remind him of his own “lightning kid” days? “I don’t know if that reminds me of me, but I would often end up in those situations and Pragg seems to cope quite well there”.

Anand would say after the event that “I think he is feeling more at home with the beasts”. But it was immediately apparent to Anand that “there are lots of areas to work on”.

Pragg had won four encounters but had also lost six times. Anand said, “He loses a lot of games then that obviously means there is a lot of scope for improvement, and lot of holes he needs to plug, what I would say that as he is getting experienced, he is getting better at fighting back.”

More than the score, “what really impressed me at Tata Steel, was that he was losing lots of games but he kept fighting, kept playing aggressive lines”, Anand says.

Meanwhile, the chess world was also going through changes. Carlsen abdicated his throne, and a new world champion, Ding Liren of China, was crowned. For a while it seemed that the mantle was to pass to Alireza Firoujza, but after the Iranian star moved to France and took up a side-career in fashion designing, it seemed that he had lost momentum, leaving a vacancy at the heart of the game. It was now also clear that Pragg was part of an emerging Big Four of Indian chess, along with Gukesh D, Arjun Erigaisi and Nihal Sarin. Indeed, three of them were in the final 16 of the World Cup, while Nihal narrowly missed making the cut. All four have gone neck-and-neck over the last few years, with their graphs showing only one direction – up.

This generation is reminiscent of the Soviet chess boom of the 1950s, when the patriarch Botvinnik, just like Anand now, had ushered in a galaxy of stars like Tal, Geller and Spassky, overthrowing the traditional order.

In this Indian wave, it seemed that Pragg had fallen behind, with social media tracking his sputtering rating growth. But Ramesh had been clear that “instead of having rating targets, we are focusing on identifying areas where he needs to prioritize and improve and identify and prioritize weaknesses and work on those areas”. Ramesh also built on Pragg’s immense computation abilities by encouraging him to visualize without moving the pieces – Pragg soon trained himself to work out variations in great depth in the mind’s eye alone.

Pragg also reduced his diet of online games and began focusing on the classical time controls, which emphasize fundamentals such as endgame play. The next thing to tackle was psychology, as Ramesh after Wijk had said: “there are some worrying issues in his psychology and game that we are both aware of and are working in resolving them”.

Anand here would offer advice from time to time, “I might have made some psychological observations simply about how I felt at a tournament, and how that state of mind influenced my play, so those are the kinds of things I tried to chat with him about.”

And while travelling to tournaments, often hopping countries all over Europe, Anand said: “I've definitely encouraged him to try different sorts of cuisine and be a little bit less picky, I think at a young age you definitely have to be flexible because not everything at a tournament can be arranged to your liking and you should adjust.”

All these tweaks came together, leading to his run in the world cup. Indeed, Carlsen after winning, said Pragg was a “mentality monster”. As Ramesh has said, “These players do not let wins go to their heads and losses to their hearts”. A credo that can sum up Pragg and this new wave.