A 16-year-old boy from India has defeated chess world champion Magnus Carlsen. The pair played each other online in a tournament involving 16 top-ranked players.
Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa is therefore the youngest player to ever beat Carlsen during his time at the top. ‘Pragg’ as he is known in the chess community, beat Carlsen in a 39 move game.
Carlsen has been world champion since 2013.
The Norwegian has been noted to be making mistakes as of late and has put much of this down to a bout of Covid-19 that he has recovered from, but which seems to have somewhat hampered his clarity of thought and concentration.
The champ said:
"It's been pretty bad. I played a couple of decent games, but the rest of them have been poor. I need to do a lot better than that."
"It's been a little bit better today… but the first couple of days I was feeling like I'm OK, but I didn't have the energy, which made it hard to focus because every time I tried to think I blundered. It was a little bit better today, but still pretty bad."
Carlsen had however won his 3 previous games in the tournament and Pragg had lost his 3 previous encounters during the tournament.
Pragg, who lives in Chennai, India, is required to stay up well into the night in order to play the tournament due to the time difference, the sleep disturbance is certainly not though affecting his abilities. He says:
"It's about just going to bed, because I don't think I will have dinner at 2:30 in the morning.”
Pragg is now regarded as one of the brightest lights in the game and could be expected to become a grandmaster or world champion sometime in the future.
[Based on reporting by: NPR]
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