18/01/2026
Excerpted with permission from The Price of Genius: Inside the World of India’s Chess Prodigies, published by Juggernaut.
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‘I think my opponent is a genius,’ said GM Wesley So, after what may have been mathematically the most unlikely loss in history for a player at the highest level of rapid chess. So’s opponent, Pragg, was rated over a thousand points lower, which gave him less than 1 per cent chance at a win. Yet, Pragg had outplayed the Filipino-American GM in an endgame to beat the odds. What is even more amazing was that Pragg was only 12 years old, the second-youngest player to ever become GM – which is equivalent to a PhD in Chess – and the youngest one at the time this game was played in the 2018 León Masters in Spain.
Pragg’s achievements, coupled with his age, put him firmly in the category of prodigies, often conflated with ‘child geniuses’ in the popular imagination, even though the two terms mean different things. For example, a 60 Minutes episode on prodigies from mathematics, music, chess and so on, broadcast in 2018 used the words ‘prodigy’ and ‘genius’ interchangeably, and included among its line-up of young prodigies the ‘Mozart of Chess’, Magnus Carlsen. Carlsen was the odd-one-out among the list not because he was not a prodigy, but because he was 28 years old and the reigning World Chess Champion at the time. Carlsen had, as an adult, elevated himself to the status of a genuine genius at chess.
His fellow guests on the show were, ‘children who, by about age 10, perform at the level of a highly trained adult in a particular sphere of activity or knowledge’.
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