'Praggnanandhaa is world number one': Viswanathan Anand after first Indian Grand Chess Tour title

R Praggnanandhaa and Viswanathan Anand NEW DELHI: You remember the photo that did the rounds on social media last April, just after Vaishali Rameshbabu, Praggnanandha’s elder sister, landed at the Chennai airport with the Candidate’s medal wrapped around her neck. It was a photo of her family.Praggnanandhaa was also there, his facial expression reflecting anything but sadness from a stunning campaign in the open candidate category, his hand holding a banner congratulating his sister on her homecoming.

Family photo after Vaishali’s Women’s Candidates win (Tushar Damor/ChessBase India)

If it was Vaishali’s moment, now is Praggnanandhaa’s.He defeated Fabian Caruana 15-13 in St Louis late on Thursday to win the Grand Chess Tour (GCT) final, becoming the first Indian and only the seventh player in the tournament’s 11-year history to do so.The prize money was $200,000. But even more than the prize money, it’s the 21-year-old who has somewhat collapsed into the 2026 contenders and now sits, according to one of the sport’s most respected judges, on top of the world.During an interaction with TimesofIndia.com, Viswanathan Anand, who is set to return to the board with the Alaskan Knights for the new Global Chess League (GCL) season this September, assessed Praggnanandhaa’s turnaround from this low number of candidates.“During the Candidates he had a kind of slump,” said the former five-time world chess champion. “His game started to drop already at the end of last year compared to the first half, but it really wasn’t very impressive in the Candidates. 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, according to Anand’s account, was something closer to a pattern than a one-time recovery.“He wasn’t doing well in Norwegian chess. At a certain point there were four rounds left and he was down. And then he won four games in a row,” Anand explained. “He did something similar here, although his performance was much better in the Grand Chess Tour and also in the Rapid. He won the Rapid, he did well enough in the Blitz to win the tournament. Then he was kind of competing for the top spot here.”It is the shape of these returns that Anand keeps coming back to. “He has that capacity and it’s becoming more and more evident that he can win late games and change everything,” he noted. “And that is a very, very rare skill and a useful skill.Then came the turn to follow Praggnanandhaa to the Olympics next month. “I think at the moment I’d say he’s the number one player in the world,” Anand told this website with the utmost authority.“Well, Magnus doesn’t compete in the same events, but still, you know, if you take the classics included, and I know Pragg, he’s done incredibly well in the tournaments that happened in August and so on. If you go back to Norwegian chess and see the development from there, I think it’s just fantastic.”It’s not an idle comparison. Praggnanandhaa’s journey to St Louis saw over 27 quick and blitz games, nine classic games and 16 more in the semi-finals and finals. He arrived after defeating Magnus Carlsen twice in classical chess earlier this year in Norway, including a run of four straight classical wins to close out Oslo.

R Praggnanandhaa (photo by Lennart Ootes)

In the final itself, GCT lost the opening classic game to Caruana and hit a likely equalizer in the second before finding his footing, winning both quick games to seize control and then holding the four-game blitz to a 4-4 draw to close it out.He has already avenged a bruise from World Championship challenger Javokhir Sindarov, who beat him twice at the Cyprus Candidates, by finishing joint first with him in the Sinquefield Cup.ALSO READ: Praggnanandhaa’s Invisible Second: Creation of Vaibhav SuriVincent Keymer also beat him there before knocking out the German in the GCT semi-finals.For a player whose technical range and versatile style have long been rated by pundits as the most complete of India’s young elite, the collapse of candidates looked like the only gap in his CV. St Louis just shut it down, to one man whose word on the subject still carries the most weight in Indian chess.