Magnus Carlsen has played 7,535 games on chess.com which includes 1,811 bullet, a chess variant played with fast time controls, typically under 3 minutes per player. These figures completely vanish in the shadow when one talks about Nihal Sarin. The 21-year-old has so far played more than 55,000 games on chess.com alone with over 22,000 in bullet. Speed chess has been Nihal’s strength, a reason why he features more in those tournaments. But it has also had an effect on his classical game.
Take the ongoing Chennai Grand Masters event for example. In three rounds so far, he has lost twice and drawn one. And in each of the games he lost – first against Vincent Keymer and on Saturday to Vidit Gujrathi, he was in the game before losing his way. Against Gujrathi, at one point on Saturday afternoon, the eval bar even showed Nihal was ahead of the game before going down again. The lone drawn encounter for Nihal in his visit to Chennai has come against Anish Giri.
At the playing venue here, over the past three days as Nihal was blowing good openings, Vishnu Prasanna has been analysing each and every move of his. With his classical game ‘stagnating’, Nihal turned to Prasanna towards the end of 2024 during the Global Chess League. Having moulded D Gukesh in his early years, bringing Prasanna on board was no brainer.
Although Prasanna didn’t say ‘yes’ immediately, in January they met again to understand what exactly Nihal wanted. “In January, he came down to Chennai for another programme. I have been working with him since March and we have had decent results. Right now, we are looking to see what we can do at the World Cup, Grand Swiss and generally get his ratings (in Classical) higher. That is my main goal,” Prasanna says.
When Nihal became a GM in 2018 at age of 14, he was supposed to be the next big name in Indian chess. Seven years later, his peers Gukesh, Arjun Erigaisi, and R Praggnanandhaa have all gone ahead of him in Classical and Nihal still remains the lone one yet to touch 2700. Srinath Narayanan who coached Nihal during his early years says it is all about gaining confidence.
“He’s hard on himself because he was once seen as the leader of this young pack but now he’s seen his peers go past him. If you see these three games here, he has actually played well, but not finishing off the games is a matter of confidence. He needs to build that back up,” Srinath says.
Prasanna points to Nihal’s formative years in particular, where most of his chess lessons were from online as a possible reason. When Prasanna was coaching Gukesh, one of the key things he did was to keep the 19-year-old away from online games. “I worked with Gukesh when he was very young so I had the opportunity to shape him. Now, I have to adapt to Nihal. His approach to the game is very different but also how do we turn it into results. There’s definitely a lot of talent, I have never seen someone like him but we have to make it into something practical. How to turn that talent into results is the question,” Prasanna says.
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With speed chess being Nihal’s obvious strength, during training sessions Prasanna is ensuring a lot of the time goes into preparing for classical. “He has to find his own way. He is a bit of a unique talent, I would say. That is what I have observed. I have not seen any player approach chess or train chess in the way he does. We are trying to figure out what we can do to make him show results based on the way he approaches chess, based on his results. His early chess education is not traditional, there’s a gap there. What can we do is ensure his enthusiasm and his interest doesn’t wane. And he still produces results,” Prasanna adds.
There have been encouraging results on the way as well, but Prasanna does admit that Nihal has stagnated a bit. “We went to the Asian, he got silver there. Right now, we’re looking to see what we can do at the World Cup, Grand Swiss, and generally to get his rating higher. That is my main goal with him. He’s been stagnating for a while. He’s already very good at the other formats. Like eSports and online Chess. He doesn’t really need my expertise there. He’s already at the top. We came up with some ideas for the eSports World Cup and it worked well, especially in the qualification stage,” Prasanna says.
Prasanna also has one eye on improving Nihal’s rating with 2700 being the gold standard. “I’m focused mostly on Classical. We tried to come up with ideas. In speed chess, anything would work for him there. But Classical, we’re trying to rapidly progress his rating, and also do well in these official events. All our training is around that,” he says.
Results (Rd 3): Masters: Vincent Keymer bt Murali Karthikeyan, Anish Giri drew with V Pranav, Vidit Gujrathi bt Nihal Sarin, Arjun Erigaisi bt Ray Robson, Awonder Liang bt Jorden van Foreest.
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Challengers: Abhimanyu Puranik bt GB Harshavardhan, Leon Mendonca bt R Vaishali, B Adhiban drew with D Harika, M Pranesh bt P Iniyan, Aryan Chopra drew with Diptayan Ghosh
