Though he stumbled at the final hurdle, the 18-year-old had an impressive run to reach Carlson—beating nos 2 and 3 Hikaru Nakamura and Fabiano Caruana, who are nearly 80 points above him in the FIDA rating. Also, he achieved the primary aim of playing tournament--- reaching the candidates tournament. There, if he wins, he will challenge World champion, China’s Ding Liren, for his title.

“He wants to be world champion,” his coach B R Ramesh said. “Magus became world champion at 22; Pragg is just 18. There are still three to five years for him to aim for the world championship. For that, we have to work extremely hard. The external environment needs some change; we need powerful machines to do the analysis. Most top players would already be using these. Also (we have to) put together a bigger team than the one we have currently. We are already talking to the people and hope it will all come together by the end of September”. The candidate tournament is scheduled for April.

“There have been a lot of positive takeaways for me.” Said Praggnandhaa. “I have never played such a long tournament and it has been a good experiment for the candidates”.

Vishal Sareen, an International master and renowned coach said Praggnandhaa surpassed his own expectations in this world cup. “The boy has a lot of dum (guts); he is fearless”, he said. “He was not overawed by Magnus. Pragg has the ability to summarize things in quick time. He also acclimatized himself to the situation very well. I definitely see a hint of Magnus in him. He is self-sufficient. I see in this (Dutch grandmaster) Anish Giri, Garry Kasparov and Magnus. Earlier, he was contemporary, now he is treated as a feared opponent.”

He even said that Praggnanandhaa was more intuitive and aggressive than Viswanathan Anand. “Having said that, he still has a long way to go”, he said.

On expanding the teen’s team, Sareen said that while the move was obvious, it would not be easy. “He would need people whom he can reach out to constantly for different things,” he said. “He will need a couple of Indians----they would be easy to reach out to.”

On the heels of the World Cup, Praggnanandaa won the inaugural FIDA World Rapid Team Championship as part of a Team that also had grandmaster Ian Nepomniachtchi and Wesley. So, before heading to Dusseldorf, Germany for the event, he had, said that hoped to “have fun” there. He did that and more, Next is TATA tournament in January.

Praggnanandhaa started 2023 with an with an Elo rating of 2684; he is now at 2,727 in the live ratings, which puts him at number 20 on the world list. Gukesh is the highest ranking Indian on the list at 8, recently overtaking the legendary Anand. So, the fact that Praggnanandhaa did better than his high-ranked compatriots—Vidit Gujrathi was also above him when the World Cup began—made a lot of people sit up and take notice. (IPA Service)