India’s Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa, 16, widely forecast as a future world class grandmaster, added to his growing reputation on Tuesday when he won the €5,000 first prize at the Reykjavik Open with an unbeaten 7.5/9. Earlier in his career, the Chennai teenager was the youngest ever international master, among the youngest ever GMs and the second youngest to reach a 2600 Fide rating.
He was singled out in this column more than five years ago for an 18-move brilliancy at age 11 in the Isle of Man which went global and was compared to Bobby Fischer’s Game of the Century against Donald Byrne.
Most recently, Praggnandhaa’s online win against Magnus Carlsen in the Airthings Masters made him the youngest to beat the No 1 in a serious game. The quality of his play at Reykjavik also impressed, notably with a brilliancy in the penultimate round.
Yet, despite it all, Praggnanandhaa’s Reykjavik victory came courtesy of a final-round gift from another Indian prodigy. Dommaraju Gukesh, 15, was two pawns up near the move 40 time control, but two catastrophic blunders gave away first the win, then the draw, before allowing a decisive checkmate in one threat.
Two other teenagers made their mark in Iceland, The youngest ever GM, Abhimanyu Mishra, 13, suffered criticism when he won the title via closed all-play-alls in Budapest which some thought were too easy. Mishra has answered his detractors by continuing to advance. His tied second in Iceland pushed his Fide rating up to 2535, giving him still a full year to break the record for the youngest ever 2600 player, currently held by John Burke of the US at 14 years and two months.
Hans Niemann is 18, old by prodigy standards, yet the Californian streamer, Harvard reject, and 2021 US junior champion, has forced his way into the limelight by a sustained run where he gained 150 rating points in 18 months to reach the world top 100, coupled with inventive attacking play. Niemann scored a draw with Black against Carlsen in the online Charity Cup, plans to play nine tournaments in a row this summer, and has boundless ambition. See his final-round miniature in the style of Mikhail Tal.
England had 26 players at Reykjavik, the largest number in an overseas open for several years, as players from GMs and IMs to veterans and teens took their opportunity.
Brandon Clarke had the best English result, finishing 12th with 6.5/9 and a single defeat. The much travelled Midlander, 26, has had spells in California and Australia, where he won the New Zealand Open, and is now back home and well established in the England top 20.
England’s outstanding success came in the senior over-65 category, where the Surrey IMs Peter Large, 66, and Nigel Povah, 69, tied for first on 5.5/9 with the six-time European team gold and USSR championship silver medallist Oleg Romanishin, 70. Romanishin, who now represents Ukraine, was placed first on tie-break with Large second and Povah third. Large’s total included draws with both Romanishin and with India’s No 4 seed and 2633-rated Baskan Adhiban.
The final rounds also brought some painful English setbacks, notably for the “Ginger GM” Simon Williams, Guildford’s Harry Grieve who missed out on his second GM norm, and the 12-year-old talent Sohum Lohia, whose calculation skills were exposed in the final two rounds but who even so achieved a sizeable rating points gain.
What of Carlsen? The multi-talented world champion, who in 2019 impressed when he led over seven million rivals at Fantasy Football, has been showing off another skill – at poker. The Norwegian Poker Championship was played in Dublin due to Norway’s strict gambling laws, and Carlsen finished 25th out of 1050 players, earning a cash prize of around €5,000.
Carlsen was finally knocked out by the poker specialist Tom Aksel Bedell, who said afterwards that he did not really want to win, as he considers Carlsen one of the three greatest Norwegian sportsmen, alongside the footballer Erling Haaland and the golfer Viktor Hovland.
Carlsen will be back at the chessboard on 22 April, when the Oslo Esports Cup, part of the Meltwater Champions Tour, starts in Oslo. Uniquely for the Tour, all eight players will be physically present in the studio, rather than playing remotely from their homes. A major attraction for chess fans is that Praggnandhaa, the teen age star of the moment, will be one of Carlsen’s seven rivals.
3811: 1 Qf7+! Nxf7 2 exf7+ Kf8 3 Ng6+ Qxg6 4 hxg6 Rb8 5 Kg2 and White’s two extra pawns will win, though it takes some time. The main point, which Hjartarson missed, is 1 Qf7+ Nxf7 2 exf7+ Kh7 and now 3 fxe8=Q?? Qg2+! 4 Kxg2 is a stalemate draw but 3 fxe8=B! wins. A forced promotion to bishop is exceptionally rare.
