This was during an online rapid tournament. So still very impressive, but Magnus loses games online all the time and I'm not _quite_ sure why this is news.
It is interesting which junior players Magnus invited to the tournament, though - besides Praggnanandhaa, there's also Andrey Esipenko, who _did_ beat Magnus in a classical game once at the prestigious Tata Steel Masters 2021, and also Nodirbek Abdusattorov, who beat Magnus late last year en route to becoming the World Rapid Champion at 17 years old. A fun group! With Vincent Keymer in the mix too, you're only really missing Nihal Sarin and (of course) Firouzja for many of the future faces of chess.
[Edit: the article says that Praggnanandhaa is the youngest player ever to beat Magnus since 2013, which would definitely be newsworthy. I think the article must be leaving out important context, since this tournament is (1) online, (2) speed chess and (3) not FIDE rated, so it typically wouldn't be included in records, and Magnus has almost certainly lost random online games to younger players before. I'm guessing the article is referencing some other source without providing the relevant criteria, which is why it looked a little weird to me.]
This context would certainly be great in the article, but I still feel it’s newsworthy. Assuming the article is correct, he’s the youngest player ever to beat Magnus since he became World Champion in 2013 - that alone is worth noticing.
He’s also the 6th youngest chess grandmaster ever, so it’s not like he’s a nobody, he’s a legit prodigy. Plus India has traditionally not been a strong chess nation (per capita), but has been up and coming recently, so that adds to the appeal of the story.
Ask your Indian friends about the national cricket team of New Zealand in world cup & world test competition (yeah, I know), then work out the per-capita of that contest.
India probably have the best cricket team in the world right now and they have depth. Their second eleven might be in the top 5. They are awesome and a period of India being the top dog is a good thing for cricket. (Some friendly played, properly tense games against Pakistan would make it even better, we can't have everything).
India pop 1,380 million
NZ pop 5 million
Norway also about 5 million
True, we tend to forget the size of the population when we compare countries. But we should also not forget that someone from a rich country has a higher chance to get funding for sports.
Absolutely wealth is critical and way, way beyond funding. You don't play at a serious level as a kid if you're genuinely poor for so many reasons. A poorer, more populous, country with higher density living has relatively much more expensive access to playing fields. In chess it's more likely to be a function of tradition, interest, free time & resource availability (computers seem like they might be important but wtf would I know about it or how many in India have readily available access to play games?) Potentially health & nutrition of pregnant mothers could play some part in some of it for some individuals and may not be equivalent across all national borders. Domestic culture and whatever class and or caste system is influential in getting access to playing in the best competitions as a junior really matters.
New Zealand is wealthy, has more playing fields than they can use, anyone who wants to can afford to play and is welcomed - even more so if they can join in and help /us/ beat those bastards from across town for whatever value of across town is most relevant to the particular team. There's a metric fudge-tonne of old cranky bastards who want to tell you what to do to do it better, not all of them are useless either. At least that's my read as a foreigner who visited once. The proportion of New Zealanders who trace their heritage to the sub-continent is likely pretty small (wikipedia says 5%). The proportion of the New Zealand national cricket team who trace their heritage to the sub-continent is quite large in comparison (~30% depending on who is selected this week?) There was a test match recently between India and NZ where all the wickets in the match were taken by people tracing their heritage to India. Cultural tradition might have something to say about that too.
Likewise Norway is close to the richest country per capita in the world. Hard to think of anywhere you'd rather be if you were bringing up kids and in the bottom 10% of wealth & income. If your kid takes an interest in chess they are likely to be able to pursue it, is my guess (Norwegians can pipe up to say how ignorant I am if necessary). Not true everywhere in the world.
@screye picked per capita as a measure. @herodoturtle pointed out how good India are at cricket right now. Seemed interesting and fun to combine those especially given recent cricket results and that basically nobody lives in NZ? Sometimes following these digressions leads somewhere interesting, informative, instructive and entertaining. Not always.
I'd never heard of it before I saw SRK playing with/against the sea in Dear Zindagi. So now that's the image I have when I read a comment like yours, and it takes me a minute to remember what it actually is!
I have played Kabaddi as a kid but somehow never imagined that it was televised. Looked for clips of Pro Kabbadi League on YouTube and couldn't help but laugh out loud because of it being presented as a serious sport with commentators and everything.
Any sport with coherent rules is no different about whether it may qualify as a "serious sport". Baseball looks pretty stupid to me as a European, and satires of Cricket often portray that as complete nonsense although it does have laws setting down exactly how it works.
In the end what matters to perception may be the attendant fuss, as you say with commentators and organised competition, but I grew up with the Football Pyramid†, which provokes healthy distrust of such things in trying to define a sport.
† Unlike with US sports like the NFL, in England Soccer is organised in a vast sprawling hierarchy of leagues, the Pyramid, with a system for teams to be promoted from a lower league to a higher one, or contrariwise demoted to a lower league, depending on their performance each season. Anybody can start at the bottom, if they can put together a group of people to turn up and play. In principle a group of friends or colleagues could create a new side, "Speen and Dean FC", that was just ridiculously good, and get promoted every season, until after a few yeares they were playing against semi-professionals, and then facing actual professional footballers in stadiums, and then playing internationals, it's all possible. Incredibly unlikely of course, but possible. And so this emphasises that actually the game you're playing kick-about with some friends, is the exact same game somebody gets paid eyewatering sums of money to play on national TV. If it's a "serious sport" is clearly just a matter of perspective.
Nodirbek was also a teenager when he first defeated him (and no, his last win wasn't the first, but first on a tournament of this level.) Norwegian supercomputer is still a human, and he has bad days.
> This was during an online rapid tournament. So still very impressive, but Magnus loses games online all the time and I'm not _quite_ sure why this is news.
Not to mention, Pragg wasn't even the lowest rated player to beat Magnus in this unrated tournament. Eric Hansen is even lower rated than pragg and he beat magnus. Sure hansen is older but so what? Pragg didn't even make it out of the preliminary stage of this tournament while hansen did.
This news story reeks of advertising masquerading as news. India is a potential huge market and it seems like the chess industry paid for this news.
As someone who follows chess, this story is so forced and unbelievable. Pragg came in 11th out of 16 and didn't make it past the first stage. Why turn it into such a huge news story?
If anything, the story should be about how pragg and ding liren have to compete in the middle of the time due to their time zones. The tournament is still going on and they make a huge story out of this? Does not compute.
As a player with a rating probably, on a good day, somewhere around one third Carlsen's it is heartening to know that there is at least one aspect of his play that I am able to emulate precisely. And, it would seem, repeatedly.
"Why is this news" is almost always an unnecessarily provocative "high-heat low-light" question. It's more substantial to point out mitigating factors and add missing context, as you also did.
I read it as a metaphorical nod to light bulbs: an inefficient light bulb spends most of its energy toward heat while producing little light. Instead of producing illuminating discussion, a "high-heat low-light" question produces flames.
It's well known that Indians will absolutely swarm any content about India put on the internet. I follow multiple youtubers that randomly see 10x their usual traffic on a video that happens to be about India in some way.
This is a well known phenomenon. IMDb (Internet Movie Database) added a Top Rated Indian Movies page* because tons of users rate virtually every Indian movie 10/10.
The USA’s disparate influence on global culture is so strong, yet we don’t say the popularity metrics are distorted for American content. Odd phrasing IMHO
Though, you may be surprised to learn that in general, western media and western commentators are pretty negative on India. See, for example, [1]. Whenever some positive news about India comes out, people come out of the woodwork with statements like "do people still shit on the streets?" "India is the rape capital of the world" "India should feed its people first", etc. etc.
Hence you can't really blame Indians for getting excited about a positive news story.
Indians are also insensitive to critics and get outraged very quickly.
I'm french and if I read any comments section of any english article about France, I'll find tons of negative comments like "cheese eating surrender monkey", "their tanks have 1 forward and 7 reverse gear" and so on.
And I only speak about the comments section, the worse are article from Murdoch's empire which plainly insult us, generating tons of money along the way because it sells well.
This type of comments is also found on indian based website, and that is super strange because India and France have not been involved together, we do not share a common history which would allow the introduction of jokes making fun of one another.
> Indians are also insensitive to critics and get outraged very quickly.
Can you blame them? It's been barely 74 years since they got independence, and yet they have managed to achieve so much: satellite launches, mission to moon, Mars, stable democracy, well-run elections, booming tech sector, nukes, etc. And they still have to deal with Western media portraying them as a shitty country.
Well France was one of the traditional colonizers and, although more cooperative historically with India, was often the opponent of the sides supported by India diplomatically (Vietnam, Africa, etc).
Also France does not have a history of traditionally winning in India (Carnatic Wars). That, coupled with the base level knowledge of WW2 that Indians are taught at school, means that Indians often take the stereotypical view online.
Perhaps not for most chess aficionados, But I for one don't mind this being blasted all over the news because Indian children have not seen school for two years now and they're hooked on to worthless reality shows & soap operas on television/streaming sites/FB/Instagram/WhatsApp; If this news motivates some of them (or) their parents to direct their attention towards chess even if its just for the prospects of fame then I'm all in for it.
This is news because it's a 16-year-old Indian kid. India has a huge Anglophone online audience that loves to boost news of Indian accomplishments, particularly those of people achieving something beyond their years.
Case in point: Last year, 18-year-old Andrey Esipenko beat Carlsen in classical time controls. It was Carlsen's first classical loss against a teenager in 10 years, and his first loss to a sub-2700 player in 5 years. It was also just 3 months after Carlsen's record-breaking streak of 125 classical games with no losses came to an end.
There was a big buzz in the chess world at the time, but it was hardly front-page material for mainstream media.
That said, of course, newsworthiness is not a competition - so congrats to both youngsters for their awesome achievements. The upcoming chess generation is looking promising! (I expect we'll see similar headlines for Alireza Firouzja someday soon)
It's sports accomplishments in general. Like in most developing countries, sports has very low priority in the Indian society, so it becomes big news when an Indian excels in any sport because it's assumed he/she had very little institutional support.
No, it isn't. Especially not if it is online rapid tournament. Indian journalists made it news. :-)
On another note, I like that guy and he is great talent, I followed his games live during the recent Tata Steel tournament (that was real classic chess tournament). He will need to prove himself against other such talents like Firouzja, which I think is around 18 and also very good, ando also that young Hungarian guy has a lot of promise. Hopefully they bring Magnus down soon. ;-)
Exactly this. I was very confused why this in particular was made into a news story, because in online rapid chess, and even more so for bullet, the only surprising outcome would be if he didn't lose a whole bunch of games.
Firouzja is at a different point in his career than the other juniors. For most people, competing in a top online tournament for prizes and a shot at taking down Magnus is a great use of time. But for Firouzja, who is the world no. 2 at 18 years old and will be participating in the next Candidates Tournament, it’s all about grinding out classical training, learning openings, etc. He spent some time doing the online circuit and even won Titled Tuesday (a major weekly tournament with hundreds of grandmasters) twice in a row last year. When he emerges again, it will be to show dominance against the world’s elite at the most rigorous time control, aiming for the next World Championship. That’s what he wants.
Definitely. Off the top of my head: Abdusattorov, Sarin, Firouzja, Keymer, Niemann, Yoo as well as Praggnanandhaa could all take down Magnus in a given blitz game, and have been strong enough to do so for several years. Rapid is definitely a tougher proposition, but most of them could steal the occasional round from Magnus there, too.
To be clear, Magnus is still one of the strongest, if not the strongest, players in the world at speed chess, but there's much more variability per game than in classical and at a given format (eg online 3+0, with premoves) probably he's edged out by any number of players.
For example, here's Nihal Sarin beating Magnus at a blitz game at 16 years old: https://www.chess.com/events/2021-magnus-carlsen-vs-challeng.... Sarin is currently rated #5 on the chess.com blitz leaderboard with an absurd rating of over 3100. Online speed chess is just a different animal - ratings are different, everyone plays lots more games, and even Magnus loses fairly often. These players are all rated high enough to be competitive with Magnus at certain speed time controls, which is my point.
And here's another example, with FM Yoav Milikow beating him on stream in 8 moves at either 15 or 16 years old (depending on Yoav's birth month). Speed chess is a different animal. https://youtu.be/mor6qpyT7jA
Not sure why this is downvoted. This is news because he is the youngest player to beat magnus since he became world champ, and it was an excellent game to boot.
This is noted in another comment, but it should be a top level comment... Magnus actively has COVID and has said that it was affecting his energy levels and ability to calculate during the early rounds of the tournament (during which this game happened).
And Pragg wasn't even the lowest rated player to beat Magnus this tournament! Eric Hansen, aka popular chess streamer "chessbrah", is even lower rated and also beat Magnus, which again you would not expect if Magnus were playing his usual level.
So still a great win and great accomplishment for Pragg, but a little context would have been nice in the article.
Even Prags coach pointed out [1], let's not get carried away. This was a great achievement but the pressure this creates can be very bad for him in the longer run.
>What he's saying: When asked on Chess24 he'd celebrate beating Carsen, Praggnanandhaa said: "I think it’s about just going to bed, because I don’t think I will have dinner at 2:30 in the morning."
I don't comprehend this quote or even the sentence Axios introduced it with. ("asked on Chess24 he'd celebrate"?) What is this saying?
> Interviewer: It must be a big day for you, beating the world champion. Will you sort of have a nice dinner, celebrate at all? Or is it just about going to bed now and get ready for day 3?
> Praggnanandhaa: I think it's about just going to bed, because I don't think I will have dinner at 2:30 in the morning.
The tournament is scheduled in the Central European Time timezone, while Praggnanandhaa is in India Standard Time. The match in question was scheduled to start at 8:00PM CET, which is 12:30AM IST.
Chess24 is the chess platform hosting the tournament. The sentence should read something like "When asked on Chess24 (the platform) how he would celebrate..."
I'm actively following chess. I was confused by the article title since I know Magnus was playing recently with somebody else (Le, Quang Liem) in the quarterfinals of the tournament.
After reading the article I've got more confused. When this is happened? What tournament? Which game format?
Finally I've realized this is just another PR stunt / clickbait / classic media article / yellow journalism and I'm just wasting my time.
Great! Congratulation for achieving a remarkable feat at a young age.
I do have one general question, not specific to him. I am just asking what other people think about such a situation. Is there a scientific method to verify the age? Because I have seen my friends reducing their age intentionally to take part in international competitions.
I know there are prodigies, and even if he is not 16 it doesn't matter to me because he beat the world champion. He deserves the accolade :)
No! That's why it is a general question, not targeted at him. Also, my friends claimed to be 14 when they were 16 because the international competition was restricted to 15 years old. However, in this game age doesn't matter, so it is irrelevant whether he is older than 16 or not.
It should be noted, that many techniques in this area are invasive, requiring blood/tissue sampling and/or exposing a person to ionizing radiation (XRays), which makes them prohibitive in many scenarios.
Side comment, but IMHO Blitz/fast-format/online is good for the game. Superstars playing it creates interest, and a young up-and-comer scoring one off Magnus creates interest.
Photogenic, media-savvy folks like Magnus or the Bortez sisters, or plenty of other examples are obviously attracting some views due to celebrity, but more people watching serious chess is just that!
I remember reading G.H. Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology that mathematics is young man's game. Can same be said for chess? Is chess a young man's game?
Yes. Though people are consistently impressed by how Vishy Anand keeping up his level, he's 52 now I believe. He was also "late" to reach the world top compared with many of the newer chess stars like Carlsen or Alireza.
World top 10 is a young man's game I believe but you can never discount a former Super-GM, they are still super strong.
It has nothing to do with religion IMO.
Education is given a lot of importance in southern India, that could have helped a tiny bit, but apart from that I don't see how it is relevant.
Dr Abdul Kalam is widely revered in India for his contributions to rocket propulsion, pretty sure he was good at math & physics as well.
Come from the same region as these folks. There is no correlation to religion in a lot of this. I studied in Govt. institutions where no one cared about a lot of religion , it was just race to the top.
I understand there is a lot more polarity now , trust me this does not have a thing!. The most inspirational engineer all of us looked to was Dr. APJ.
Peer groups matter
This player is obviously a really good chess player, but I wouldn't get too focused on his exact age - families in India and Pakistan often register their children's age as younger than their true age, for girls because they think it will give them a few more years to find a good "match" for marriage once they are adults, and also sometimes for boys if they are small for their true age, to prevent bullying and help them do better academically.
Source: personal family members who have done this - you ask the kids what their date of birth is, they ask "the real one or the paper one"?
There's no reason to suspect that's what Rameshbabu's parents have done. There's no reason to bring this up. With a billion+ people everything is technically possible. Painting everything with the same brush isn't helping anything.
Do I “suspect” them? Of course not, I don’t even know them. But are you disagreeing with the idea that the probability of an inaccurate age is non-trivial in these sorts of situations? Same as when discussing world records of “world’s oldest person” - data inaccuracy should always be a consideration if you care about understanding reality. But if you’re just looking for warm fuzzy feels, then I can see why you might take offense at someone interrupting that with non-fuzzy facts.
This is bs. A cursory YouTube search shows him being interviewed at 9 and he doesn't look older than 9 possibly even younger. Lance Armstrong doped, does that mean that all American athletes dope?
It is interesting which junior players Magnus invited to the tournament, though - besides Praggnanandhaa, there's also Andrey Esipenko, who _did_ beat Magnus in a classical game once at the prestigious Tata Steel Masters 2021, and also Nodirbek Abdusattorov, who beat Magnus late last year en route to becoming the World Rapid Champion at 17 years old. A fun group! With Vincent Keymer in the mix too, you're only really missing Nihal Sarin and (of course) Firouzja for many of the future faces of chess.
[Edit: the article says that Praggnanandhaa is the youngest player ever to beat Magnus since 2013, which would definitely be newsworthy. I think the article must be leaving out important context, since this tournament is (1) online, (2) speed chess and (3) not FIDE rated, so it typically wouldn't be included in records, and Magnus has almost certainly lost random online games to younger players before. I'm guessing the article is referencing some other source without providing the relevant criteria, which is why it looked a little weird to me.]