‘Blunder of Praggnanandhaa’s career’: Indian gets checkmated from won position

It was an error so unexpected that it was simultaneously called the blunder of the Total Chess pilot tournament, and the worst mistake of R Praggnanandhaa’s career. In the first game of the two-game fourth round encounter against Hungarian grandmaster Richard Rapport on Saturday, Pragg got checkmated in a single move from a completely winning position after failing to see the threat from Rapport’s queen.

When Rapport delivered the checkmate, the Indian slid back his chair, almost as if he was physically distancing himself from what he had just done. On the official Total Chess broadcast, commentator Fiona Steil-Antoni remarked that this was the “blunder of the tournament”.

British grandmaster David Howell, commentating with Steil-Antoni, said: “It’s the blunder of Pragg’s career. Don’t think he’s played a move like that since he was a very young boy. It was a moment of blindness.” The game started with Rapport, who has a reputation for being creative, trying to catch Pragg out of the opening with the very unconventional pawn push on h3 on the second move.

“Games with Richard are always fun. He’s such a creative player that he went for h3 in the second move,” Pragg said during a visit to the Confession Booth in the middle of his game. By the 16th move, Pragg was in trouble on the clock with just six minutes left while his opponent had almost 20.

But after that, Pragg spent most of the middle game building his advantage on the board. By the 21st move, Pragg’s clock was down to barely a minute but he had an additional rook on the board compared to Rapport’s extra pawn and a knight.

A mistake from Rapport on the 27th move gave Pragg an opening. He grabbed it and continued to press his advantage. His rook and queen started moving in for the kill on the back rank, with Rapport’s king on g2 surrounded by a bunch of pieces guarding it from the other side.

With his rook on c1 and queen on e1, Pragg started laying the groundwork for checkmate by moving his pawn to d6, thus opening up the c8 square for his bishop that would make checkmate inevitable. On his next move, Pragg would have moved the bishop to c8.

But with his final throw of the dice, a desperate Rapport moved his knight to block the diagonal where Pragg’s bishop would have attacked. Instead of making a move to eliminate the threat from Rapport’s queen, Pragg still played bishop to c8, completely missing that Rapport could checkmate him by throwing his queen on g7.

The Hungarian made the move in a flash, thus delivering a checkmate and completing one of the wildest turnarounds at the tournament. “That’s one of the strangest things I have seen in ages. It’s just not been Pragg’s event,” Howell said on the Total Chess broadcast.

Over the course of seven fast classical games at Total Chess, Pragg has lost three games now, drawing the other four. He’s lost 18 Elo rating points over the course of the four days in Budapest. The loss solidified Praggnanandhaa’s position at the bottom of the six-player Group B.

Meanwhile, R Vaishali also plummeted to the bottom of the standings in Group D after a defeat to Wesley So. Meanwhile, the third Indian in the fray, Arjun Erigaisi grabbed a quick draw with French grandmaster Maxime Vachier-Lagrave.

(The writer is in Budapest at the invitation of Total Chess) Amit Kamath is Assistant Editor at The Indian Express and is based in Mumbai. He primarily writes on... Read More