4 min readOsloMay 31, 2026 10:50 AM IST
On Friday, the day Gukesh had turned 20, the world champion and most of the other participants at this year’s Norway Chess tournament had found themselves out on the Oslofjord in a faux boat race as part of the annual Norway Chess games. The air had been light, the weather crisp, the sky a soothing azure. None of the tension that seeps into the air when you put so many grandmasters in vicinity of each other was there. Pragg had spent plenty of the trip out on the sea lounging on the hull of their ship in Vincent Keymer’s company, soaking up the Nordic sun. Gukesh, on another boat, had been serenaded by the birthday song more than once. Both Indian prodigies had walked from their hotel to the harbour together for the Norway Chess Games, laughing with each other in a rare moment of both of them letting their guards down in the middle of a tournament.
One day later, both Gukesh and Pragg were at war. The smiles had disappeared. The business suits and the business-like expressions were back. It was a duel whose outcome was decided over the course of a few minutes. Gukesh went from losing his fifth round game at Norway Chess to R Praggnanandhaa to getting a resignation out of his compatriot. Time scrambles can do that to the best of minds. But Saturday evening’s game between two flagbearers of the Indian golden generation had the evaluation jumping around like it was riding a hedgehog!
The result was a significant one for the boy who recently turned 20, particularly coming on the heels of a bruising fourth-round defeat to world no 1 Magnus Carlsen.
“I’m surely doing much, much better than I was doing even a couple of months earlier,” Gukesh later told Norway’s TV2 in an interview. “I feel much sharper and much happier in general. The results are still improving, but not where I want to be.”
He had then spoken about how his feeling good was linked to his improving play.
“When you feel good about yourself, you also feel sharper on the board. And you trust yourself more with quick decisions. These are very minor things but at the end of the day that’s what makes the difference,” he added.
Thanks to the victory, Gukesh now finds himself in third spot in the tournament standings with Pragg one spot behind. At the bottom of the table is five-time world champion Magnus Carlsen who slumped to another defeat on Saturday — his third one at Oslo in a week — to find himself five-and-a-half points behind leader Alireza Firouzja. Carlsen had chased all out victory over Wesley So, despite the situation on the board not favouring him, and paid the price.
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But the game that carried the most weight was the Gukesh vs Pragg one.
In a game that resembled the coiled tension of a warzone from the start, R Praggnanandhaa was winning by the 36th move. In two more moves from white, the position equalled out. Then Gukesh was winning one move later. Then, the eval bar indicated parity on the board again. Another move from white gave a slight edge to Gukesh again. Pragg had two passed pawns on the c and d files, both with rooks standing sentry behind them.
But on the 43rd move, luck smiled on Gukesh as Praggnanandhaa moved his king to f2 which opened the doors for Gukesh to start pulling a mating net around his opponent’s king. It was a difficult move to find in dire time pressure, but the world champion found it. Over the span of a few moves, the game was over.
Gukesh later admitted to feeling plenty of pressure from the start of the game because of how tense things were on the board.
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“What can I say, just a very complex game,” Gukesh remarked in another interview with the Norway Chess broadcast team. “It was maybe a bit easier for me because I just needed to throw everything at his king. There were so many tricks that I got super nervous at the end. And the tricks worked out for me.”
