Of Pragg and the new golden generation of Indian chess

When five-time FIDE world champion Magnus Carlsen said a few months ago that India was on the verge of a chess revolution — it was not simply a figure of speech. The just concluded World Cup in Baku showed why, as R. Praggnanandhaa surpassed all expectations to reach the final, and as many as four Indians crowded the quarterfinals of the elite tournament.  

Just ponder this: eight Indians feature in the world’s top 100 chess players as per the current FIDE rankings, with the quartet of Pragg, N. Gukesh, Arjun Erigaisi and Nihal Sarin still in their teens. A far cry from the 1990s or the first two decades of the new millennium, when the iconic Viswanathan Anand ploughed a lonely furrow while chess was still considered a domain of the US, Russia, and a handful of European countries. 

The top 10 list now has two Indians, with the prodigious Gukesh at number eight and Anand — the five-time world champion who has been rather selective in choosing his tournaments — at nine. Ding Liren, the current world champion from China, is ranked third in a list headed by Carlsen himself, perhaps a sign that the chess world has become more democratic now. 

Of the Indians in the top 100, Pragg's ranking will surely take a big leap from 22 after his brilliance in Baku. The others are Vidit Gujrathi (26), Erigaisi (28), Pentala Harikrishna (30), Sarin (51), SL Narayanan (85) and Aravindh Chithambaram (99). And this is just the cream that we are talking about. 

Statistics from May 2023 show that there are 82 grandmasters in the country now. This represents an explosion of sorts, with the number hovering around just 20 before 2010.  

The journey began in 1988, with Anand making it to the stratosphere. Today, the top 10 active Indian men’s chess players have an average ELO rating of 2670, second only to the US, while the 10 active women’s players have a rating of 2405, third highest in the world behind China and Russia.  

Add to these 124 international masters (IM), 23 women’s GMs and 42 women international masters (WIM), and the organic growth the sport has seen in the last two decades speaks for itself. There is no gainsaying that Anand has been the pied piper of this movement for the last three decades, but he can now rest easy that the future of chess in the country is safe in the hands of a few shy, diffident youngsters like Pragg and Gukesh. 

“It’s awesome to see both the interest in chess (from the public and media) and the huge numbers of young Indian players that are taking over the chess scene. I think we’re just at the beginning of a chess revolution that started with Viswanathan Anand becoming a grandmaster and eventually winning the world championship. What we’re seeing now, it’s only going to get better,” said Carlsen after his team, SG Alpine Masters, lost to Balan Alaskan Knights at the Global Chess League (GCL) held in Dubai in June this year. 

Carlsen is teammates with Gukesh, Arjun and Pragg in the GCL, and has been spending long hours over meals talking chess positions. “All three of them are really good. I’m just letting them do their thing and then answer any questions they might have. But I think they’re really good. Most of the time, they don’t need my inputs. 

“They calculate extremely well. Pragg has shown in the Champions Chess tour online that he is extremely good at rapid chess… that’s when he’s at his best. The chess that he’s playing here suggests that he is taking even further steps. It’s been really impressive to see,” Carlsen had said. 

The trickle is turning into a flood. First, there was a slew of youngsters becoming GMs, then we saw signs of maturity and staying power at the Chess Olympiad, and now we are seeing it at the Chess World Cup too. The golden generation of Indian chess, led by Gukesh and Praggnanandhaa, but also made up of many other promising young people, is starting to truly make its mark on the world stage.