Praggnanandhaa Won Tata Steel 2025 the Hard Way: By Losing First

The final round of the 87th Tata Steel Chess Masters, January 2025, was a disaster for both leaders, and somehow that made the result better.

Praggnanandhaa and Gukesh had been tied at the top of the standings going into Round 13 in Wijk aan Zee. Both needed a result. What they got was the opposite. Arjun Erigaisi, Pragg’s own teammate on the Indian national squad, beat Gukesh in 31 moves. And Vincent Keymer beat Praggnanandhaa in a game that went nearly seven hours. Both leaders lost. Both finished on 8.5/13.

So Pragg won the 2025 Tata Steel Chess Masters by losing in Round 13 and then coming back for a playoff.

The decisive sudden-death game

The playoff was three blitz games. Game 1 went to Gukesh after Pragg blundered. Game 2 went the other way: Gukesh returned the favor with a blunder of his own, and Pragg leveled the match. That set up a third, sudden-death game, Pragg had White with the extra time, Gukesh only needed a draw with Black. Gukesh actually won a pawn out of the opening and had the more comfortable position for a stretch. Then, in a level endgame he could have simply held, he pressed for more, overextended, and dropped a piece. Pragg didn’t need to be spectacular in the decider. He needed Gukesh to blink first, and on this particular afternoon, that’s exactly what happened.

Pragg opened with the London System (1.d4 2.Nf3 3.Bf4), a positional choice given he had to win with the clock running against him. Nothing about the London forces matters early: it’s a system built to reach a playable middlegame without early risk, and let the position, not the opening, decide the game. After an early queen trade he steered into a knight-vs-bishop endgame, found the king march to b6 to support the passed b-pawn, and the knight maneuver Nxe5 sealed it.

Gukesh had already been World Chess Champion for six weeks when this happened. He’d won the championship in Singapore in December 2024. He came to Wijk aan Zee as the reigning world title holder, and he lost the playoff to a player a year older and a few hundred rating points below him on the live list.

That’s chess.

How Pragg actually got to Round 13 tied for first

The tournament wasn’t a clean run. Praggnanandhaa lost to Anish Giri in Round 9, and by his own coach’s account afterward, the loss rattled him: he’d had a similar mid-tournament collapse in 2023 and was worried about repeating it. He answered with three straight wins in Rounds 10 through 12, then lost a nearly seven-hour game to Vincent Keymer in the Round 13 finale, the same round Gukesh lost to Erigaisi, which is what forced the tie and the playoff in the first place.

Part of the credit, per his coach, goes to a deliberate style adjustment made mid-event: play a little less classically correct, be more willing to take risks, get back the “creativity and risk-taking tendencies” that a young player can lose once results start mattering enough to make them cautious. Pragg had reportedly become, in his coach’s word, “too professional.” Whatever the mechanism, it worked. After the final game of the playoff he told reporters, “I’m still shaking, it was such a crazy day.”

Why this tournament matters

Tata Steel is routinely called the “Wimbledon of Chess”. Partly because of its age. The event started in 1938 as a steelworkers’ tournament in nearby Beverwijk, sponsored by the Dutch steelmaker Koninklijke Hoogovens, and moved to Wijk aan Zee in 1968, where it’s been played every year since. Hoogovens merged with British Steel in 1999 to form the Corus Group, which sponsored the event under the Corus name until the Tata Group acquired Corus in 2007 and the tournament took the Tata Steel name in 2011. Through every rebrand the numbering has stayed continuous back to the 1938 original, which is why the 2025 edition is officially the 87th, not some smaller number reset to a new sponsor.

Partly because of the setting, too. Wijk aan Zee is a village on the North Sea coast about 30 km north of Amsterdam. The playing hall sits near the beach. The tournament is embedded in the local community in a way that major chess events usually aren’t: residents play in side events, the town follows the results, players walk along the dunes between rounds.

The winners’ list is the other reason the event carries weight. Magnus Carlsen has won it a record eight times. Garry Kasparov dominated it through the 1990s. Max Euwe, Viktor Korchnoi, Levon Aronian, and Lajos Portisch each won it four times. Viswanathan Anand won it five times. Praggnanandhaa’s 2025 title puts him in that lineage, not as a footnote but as the third player from India, after Anand, to win the event outright.

The field at Wijk aan Zee is always competitive. The 2025 Masters included Gukesh, Pragg, Arjun Erigaisi, Fabiano Caruana, Hikaru Nakamura, Wei Yi, and Vincent Keymer among others. Seven players in the top fifteen in the world, all playing classical chess for two weeks in a room with no spectator noise.

Praggnanandhaa’s playing style

Praggnanandhaa R (born August 10, 2005, in Chennai) became a grandmaster in June 2018 at 12 years, 10 months, and 13 days, earning his third and final norm at the Gredine Open in Urtijëi, Italy. At the time that made him the second-youngest grandmaster in history, behind only Sergey Karjakin’s 2002 record of 12 years, 7 months. (Karjakin’s record has since fallen too: American prodigy Abhimanyu Mishra broke it in 2021 at 12 years, 4 months, and 25 days.) He was 19 when he won Tata Steel.

His style is confrontational. He doesn’t grind; he attacks. He’d reached the 2023 Chess World Cup final against Magnus Carlsen, pushing Carlsen to tiebreaks before losing. That run established him at the elite level before he’d turned 18.

The Tata Steel win marked his first major classical super-tournament title. Not the World Cup, not an online event, a classical round-robin against a full elite field over 13 rounds. That’s a different kind of result than a knockout format, and the chess world noticed.

The player he most resembles historically is Mikhail Tal, attacking, calculating deeply in sharp positions, willing to sacrifice material for initiative. The Life and Games of Mikhail Tal is the best annotated game collection in chess literature for players who want to understand that kind of attacking chess. Tal annotated his own games, and the writing is both technically useful and genuinely entertaining.

The Indian factor

Three of the top four players at Wijk aan Zee 2025 were Indian. Gukesh was the world champion. Pragg won the tournament. Arjun Erigaisi had the most impressive individual result in the final round (31-move win over the world champion). The Thai Dai Van Nguyen won the Challengers section and earned a Masters invitation the following year.

For anyone following Indian chess right now, this was Wijk aan Zee as an extension of the Budapest narrative: a generation that’s winning everything at once. The full breakdown of that generation covers the structural reasons why it’s happening.

The clock at every board in Wijk aan Zee is the DGT 3000. If you’re getting serious about rated play, that’s the clock to own. Our chess clock guide covers the full comparison.

Sources

• Tata Steel Chess Tournament 2025, Wikipedia
• Praggnanandhaa wins Tata Steel Masters 2025. Official Tata Steel Chess site
• The Week in Chess: Pragg wins the Tata Steel Masters after dramatic final round
• Pragg Is Back! 9 Conclusions, Chess.com
• Tata Steel Chess Tournament, Wikipedia (sponsorship history, all-time win totals)
• R Praggnanandhaa, Wikipedia (grandmaster title timeline)
• Tata Steel 2025 Tiebreak PGN, Lichess broadcast
• Tal, Mikhail. The Life and Games of Mikhail Tal. Everyman Chess, 1997.