These players have either won the FIDE World Cup chess title or FIDE knockout World Championship title. But none of the players named above went on to win the World Matchplay title, considered as the Mount Everest of the 64-square sport where Garry Kasparov, Vishwanathan Anand and Magnus Carlsen have built their own caves.
The Khalifmans and Dudas of this world have not reached even the Challenger status. But Boris Gelfand and Sergei Karjakin – who were also World Cup winners – became the challengers after winning this title. V Anand won the knockout title and then won the Matchplay crown. Kramnik did the reverse. He first became the matchplay champion and then won the knockout title too.
R Praggnanandhaa cannot take anything for granted, going by this historical variety on offer. He is just 18 and recently entered the Elo 2700 club. By his own admission, he needs to work a lot on his classical (standard time control) chess, especially the opening repertoire. And going by the thumbs up to his work ethic from his coach RB Ramesh, Prag seems to be in a good space.
On one hand, it is highly creditable to reach so far in the knockout format, where except world champion Ding Liren of China, almost all elite chess players participated. That was not the case earlier as the legends used to drop out of the knockout event. But round-robin formats and Open tournaments are where the champion materials are baked before they chase the big cherry.
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Chess World Cup final: Carlsen beats Praggnanandhaa in tie-breaks to win the title
The 14-round eight-player Candidates tournament in Canada next April, where Prag will play, will be played in the double round-robin format. The winner of that event will get a chance to dethrone Ding Liren.
When you attain a draw in a knockout format (with match score being equal), it doesn’t pinch you. But it hurts you in Open and round-robin tournaments as other players in the same field march ahead and you have to catch up to finish on top. Candidates tournament don’t have a provision of tiebreaks of short time controls till the last cycle. So, one has to prove superiority only in classical chess.
In those type of tournaments – which are more dominant on the classical circuit than the knockout ones – you have to prove more conclusively that you are better than all others put together. In the knockout, you can become champion without beating the best in the business if they get eliminated early on, which was the case with Carlsen where he didn’t meet any of the top-8 players in this World Cup. In the Candidates, you have to meet them and beat some of them too.
Prag has reached thus far by beating top guys like Hikaru Nakamura and Fabiano Caruana, albeit via tiebreaks. Pragg’s performance has shown that he has got the potential – and so do D Gukesh and Erigaisi Arjun – to follow Anand’s path.
