Jun 26, 2025 11:14 AM IST
Aarit Kapil from Delhi recently came close to defeating current World No. 1 Magnus Carlsen in an online chess game.
Indian chess has been growing exponentially, with three GMs within the top category of the current live rankings. Arjun Erigaisi is the current World No. 4, followed by reigning world champion D Gukesh in fifth position and R Praggnanandhaa in seventh place. Now a nine-year-old Indian chess player has been put under the spotlight.
Aarit Kapil from Delhi recently came close to defeating current World No. 1 Magnus Carlsen in an online chess game. It was part of an event called ‘Early Titled Tuesday’, which was hosted on Chess.com. He put the Norwegian in a tight situation in their blitz clash and was in a winning position at one point. But then with only a few seconds left on his clock, the chess prodigy failed to convert his advantage and the game ended in a draw.
Aarit was also reportedly playing the game from a hotel room in Georgia, where is participating in the U-10 World Chess C’ship. He won both his games in the firsy two rounds of the tournament.
Recently, Carlsen broke his silence when asked about a probable successor. He simply said, “There is no one. There is no one at the moment. That’s the honest answer. There could be, but at the moment, it’s not likely.”
“At the moment, I still think that the older guys are better. Every single one of them (kids) has very, very clear flaws in their games.”
Passing his verdict on Gukesh, he remarked, “I think Gukesh showed in this tournament that he is on track, he is doing fantastic, but he’s maybe not way ahead of track as we may have thought.”
“I think he is kind of little bit where I was, 2008, 2009ish, where he can do extremely well, but you can still see that there are that great results that come not only with the quality of positional play, it’s a lot of fighting qualities. That is what kids are supposed to do, you are not supposed to master everything at that age. As for the others, yes, they are good but the likelihood of one of them becoming like a very clear number one, I don’t see it very clearly at the moment,” he added.
