Pranav becomes world junior chess champion

Bengaluru: In the space of less than four months, India has another world champion in chess. Grandmaster Pranav Venkatesh is the new world junior chess champion. He needed only a draw in the final round to win the open category of the tournament held in Petrovac, Montenegro with a 9/11 score.

The Under-20 event had nearly 230 players from 44 countries participating, with 157 players (including 12 GMs) from 63 countries in the open section. Pranav was the second-highest rated player in the open field after Belgian GM Daniel Dardha.

Five-time world champion Viswanathan Anand – who was the first Indian to win the world junior title in 1987 in Baguio – took Pranav under his wing, and the 18-year-old has been a mentee at the Westbridge Anand Chess Academy. Much like reigning world champion Gukesh D.

Pentala Harikrishna and Abhijeet Gupta are the other former world junior champions from India. Gupta was the last Indian to win the title in 2008.

Pranav, who became India’s 75th Grandmaster in 2022, did so by picking up two of his three GM norms and crossing the 2500-Elo mark in two months. He famously defeated world No 1 Magnus Carlsen in the titled Tuesday online tournament in 2023 and in the same year was part of Carlsen’s Offerspill Chess Club side that won the European Chess Club Cup.

Last year, he won a double gold at the World Youth Under-18 World rapid and blitz as well as the Challenger section of the Chennai Grand Masters where he defeated D Harika, Vaishali R, and Murali Karthikeyan.