NEW DELHI: You remember the photo that made rounds on social media last April, just after Vaishali Rameshbabu, Praggnanandhaa’s elder sister, had landed at the Chennai airport with the Women’s Candidates medal wrapped around her neck. It was a photo of her family.Praggnanandhaa was there too, his facial gesture mirroring anything but the sorrow of an underwhelming campaign in the open category of the Candidates, his hand holding a placard congratulating his sister on her homecoming.
A family photo after Vaishali’s Women’s Candidates win (Tushar Damor/ChessBase India)
If that was Vaishali’s moment, Praggnanandhaa’s is now.Late Thursday in St Louis, he beat Fabiano Caruana 15-13 to win the Grand Chess Tour (GCT) Finals, becoming the first Indian and only the seventh player in the tournament’s 11-year history to do it.The prize money was $200,000. But even more than the prize money, it is about a 21-year-old who somewhat imploded at the 2026 Candidates and now sits, by one of the sport’s most respected judges, at the top of the world.During an interaction with TimesofIndia.com, Viswanathan Anand, who is set to return to the board with Alaskan Knights for the new season of the Global Chess League (GCL) this September, assessed Praggnanandhaa’s turnaround since that Candidates low.“During the Candidates, he was having a kind of slump,” the former five-time World Chess Champion said. “His play had already started to decline at the end of last year, compared to the first half, but in the Candidates, it was really not very impressive. And then I thought he must have been a bit gloomy.”
I think at the moment, I would say he (Pragg) is the number one player in the world.
Viswanathan Anand, former five-time World Chess Champion
What followed, in Anand’s telling, was something closer to a pattern than a one-off recovery.“In Norway Chess, he was not doing well. At some point, there were four rounds left, and he was in the bottom. And then he won four games in a row,” Anand explained. “He did something similar here, though his performance was much better in Grand Chess Tour and also in the Rapid. He won the Rapid, did well enough in the Blitz to win the tournament. Then he was sort of competing for first place here.”It’s the shape of these comebacks that Anand keeps returning to. “He has this capacity, and it’s becoming more and more noticeable that he’s able to win late games and change everything,” he remarked. “And that’s a very, very rare skill and useful skill to have.”Then came the line that will follow Praggnanandhaa into the Olympiad next month. “I think at the moment, I would say he’s the number one player in the world,” Anand told this website with utmost authority.“Well, Magnus doesn’t compete in the same events, but nonetheless, you know, if you take classical included, and I know Pragg, in the tournaments which happened in August and all, he performed incredibly well. If you go back to Norway Chess and then see the development from there, I think it’s just fantastic.”It’s not an idle comparison. Praggnanandhaa’s road to St Louis ran through 27 rapid and blitz games, nine classical games, and 16 more across the semifinals and final. He arrived having already beaten Magnus Carlsen twice in classical chess in Norway earlier this year, including a stretch of four straight classical wins to close out Oslo.
R Praggnanandhaa (Photo by Lennart Ootes)
In the GCT final itself, he lost the opening classical game to Caruana and fumbled a likely equaliser in the second before finding his footing, winning both rapid games to seize control, then holding the four-game blitz section to a 4-4 draw to close it out.He’d already avenged a bruising from World Championship Challenger Javokhir Sindarov, who beat him twice at the Cyprus Candidates, by finishing joint-first with him at the Sinquefield Cup.ALSO READ: Praggnanandhaa’s invisible second: The making of Vaibhav SuriHe’d been beaten there by Vincent Keymer, too, before eliminating the German in the GCT semifinal.For a player whose technical range and universal style have long had experts rating him the most complete of India’s young elite, the Candidates collapse had looked like the one gap in the resume. St Louis just closed it, in front of the one man whose word on the subject still carries the most weight in Indian chess.
