By india’s prodigal son, Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa, has returned and shattered records in doing so. The 18-year-old prodigy has managed to defeat the current chess world champion, Ding Liren, and surpassed Anand Vishwanathan to become India’s number 1 chess player. The match took place in India during the 2024 Tata Steel Chess Tournament.
Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa is India’s youngest and the world’s 2nd youngest chess grandmaster ever. He was just 12 in 2018 when he achieved the grandmaster title. He even holds a win against the consensus greatest Chess player in the world, Magnus Carlsen. Interestingly, Rameshbabu’s sister, R Vaishali, is also a Chess Grandmaster and the newest grandmaster of India, making them the first-ever brother-sister duo of chess grandmasters in the world.
The young prodigy, who started playing chess when he was 5, expressed his thoughts on this win by saying, “The first time winning against a world champion in classical chess feels good”. Praggnanandhaa said that he was surprised by the outcome and stated, “I felt I equalised very easily, and then somehow things started to go wrong for him. Even after I won the pawn, I felt it should be holdable.”
This marks a new era of Indian Chess. Praggnanandhaa is only 18 years old and has a whole career ahead of him, which truly makes us wonder what his ceiling is. We hope to see Praggnanadhaa win more tournaments and etch his and India’s name in history. Even Magnus Carlsen has said before that he believes that Praggnanandhaa can surpass him and become the greatest chess player in the world.
