BENGALURU: Even as Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa was beginning to make waves within Chennai's imposing chess circle, he wasn't even the best player in his immediate family. That honour went to R Vaishali. His elder sister, the story goes, had even beaten Magnus Carlsen in an over-the-board simul in Chennai when the Norwegian had come to India to take part in the World Championship match against Viswanathan Anand in 2013.
So, Pragg, even though he was breaking several age-group records, was still known as Vaishali's brother. That, though, changed very quickly as he started racking up the required norms to make Grandmaster. In 2018, after Pragg had become GM at the age of 12, there was a role reversal of sorts.
Vaishali had become Pragg's sister. In her own way, she was making a name for herself on the world stage. She had become an IM and had two GM norms but the third and final one took time to come. It began to eat at her. In the interim, her brother, who took to the game after watching his sister, had become a super GM.
Enroute Hangzhou for the Asian Games in 2023, Vaishali confessed about this pressure to her trainer, Sandipan Chanda. Chanda, a then recent addition to her camp, gave her a priceless piece of advice. Forget about the final norm or the rating points. Play chess like how you used to play when you were young. Since then, the girl from Chennai has won four FIDE Classical tournaments, the most by any player in this time period (including the Olympiad gold).
On Wednesday night, she won her fourth. Playing the biggest match of her life, she defeated Kateryna Lagno to earn a shot at the world title. Standing outside the playing hall was her little brother. Pragg had become her brother again. A cycle had quietly completed.
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Chennai has a lot of recreational chess players. They all start playing the game because parents tend to buy their kids chess sets to wean them off screens (chess is usually the preferred distraction as it's indoors, away from the harsh sun). That's exactly what Nagalakshmi did. Vaishali, when she was around six, was borderline addicted to Pogo and Cartoon Network. Her parents were concerned with her screen time so they decided to keep her busy.
Apart from drawing classes, they put her in a chess class. Within six months, she showed an aptitude for the game. It kind of helped that sibling Praggnanandhaa, around 3 at the time, liked to toy with the pieces on the board. So he also started receiving some classes. A family started taking their first classes in the game that has come to define them over the last 12 years or so.
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Vaishali's world changed in 2024. What players take a lifetime to achieve, she did in a 10-month period. A first Grand Swiss crown. The third and final GM norm. Rated over 2500. A first Candidates appearance. An Olympiad gold with the women's team. When she spoke to this daily after that gold in Budapest, she called it a dream year. "It's been great," she had said. It was during this interview where she openly spoke about her issues with meeting the final GM norm. "When I won the Grand Swiss (in 2023), my mindset changed," she had reflected. "Earlier, I used to take in a lot of pressure to complete the GM title. Every tournament I played, I was trying to increase my rating, get GM norms as it was my big dream.
"Whatever tournament I played, I played for GM norms but I realised it wasn't helping me anywhere. The pressure was not helping me to play my best chess. That realisation helped me. That's when I started to play freely, like how I used to play when I was a kid. That mindset change helped me to play my best chess."
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GM Srinath Narayanan, who worked with Vaishali during a Covid-era online Olympiad, says Vaishali is very 'resourceful'. In this context, it means her ability to keep fighting, reducing it to a tactical battle. She showed an example of that on Wednesday when she found the 40. c4 idea, something Lagno didn't legislate for in the position. Ideas like these, Narayanan said, 'comes through a lot when you are from Chennai'. "We didn't have the best of techniques growing up but we were very strong in tactics," the coach-cum-administrator explained. "We would never accept defeat and, quite often, we turned positions around. I think Vaishali is a typical Chennai player in that sense."
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At the Chennai Grand Masters event in August 2025, Vaishali suffered. Mentally. Competing in the Challengers section, she picked up one point over nine games (two draws followed by seven back-to-back defeats). She was playing stronger players but the results had come as a shock to her.
By the time the competition had finished, she had not only stopped giving interviews but was contemplating whether to take part in the Grand Swiss in September, a qualifying tournament for the Candidates. Praggnanandhaa and Karthikeyan Murali, another GM from Ramesh's Academy, talked her out of a dark place. It had reached a point where she had even decided to skip the Grand Swiss.
It was easy to understand why. Between Norway Chess, Batumi (World Cup) and that Chennai event spanning a few months, she had lost a lot of rating points and that confidence had disappeared.
Post that pep talk, though, she fought through self doubts and landed in Samarkhand with renewed purpose and vigour. She won three Classical games to start her tournament. A smile had returned to her face.
It was the same smile inside the playing venue of the luxury resort on Wednesday night.
