Anand pat for Chennai prodigy

Ace chess player Viswanathan Anand heaped praise on young Indian prodigy R Praggnanandhaa, on Tuesday.

Earlier this year, Chennai’s 11-year-old Praggnanandhaa became the youngest International Master (IM), after performing well in Cannes, Moscow, and Bhubaneshwar.

Anand who was in Mumbai for the promotion of the IIFL Chess tournament here, believes that becoming an IM at such a young age will help the Praggnanandhaa.

“He’s attracted worldwide attention. He’s a very famous Indian chess player right now. Somehow he’s captured everyone’s imagination,” said Anand.

“But there’s still a lot of time for him to progress, and I hope that he’ll do it steadily. He’s showing very good signs of progress, but it’s a long hard road (ahead),” he continued.

“As you know, the problem for youngsters is finding the right tournaments to play and getting a chance to compete.”

“And for him, if this opens a lot of doors, it’s nice. Which is why I think the junior tournament (IIFL) is a very healthy initiative,” said Anand.

When asked about his own performance in 2016, Anand decided to look at the positive side of things. The 47-year-old managed to win only one tournament last year – Leon Masters Rapid Tournament.

“It was a slightly disappointing end of the year for me, but it’s a very tough tournament. Normally you may have one bad day,” said Anand. “But here you could have nine bad days or 11 bad days, depending on the number of rounds.

“I won’t think about it too much. Mostly the year has been positive, but I will certainly look at the mistakes that I’ve made and try to work on them,” he said.