When people talk about the youngsters of Indian chess they usually speak about Praggnanandhaa, Nihal Sarin, D. Gukesh, Raunak Sadhwani, Prithu Gupta and so on. But there is one lad, slightly older than the rest, born in 2003 and 15 years old, who is taking the chess world by a storm. He is none other than Arjun Erigaisi, Telangana's first GM. At the recently concluded World Youth Olympiad 2018 in Turkey he performed at an Elo of 2678 and beat three strong opponents - Abdusattorov Nodirbek of Uzbekistan, Andrey Esipenko of Russia and Viktor Matviishen of Ukraine. In this article you can go through all the three games and two of them have been annotated by Arjun himself. This is the perfect way to know how strong Arjun really is.
When you look at the list of the top 50 youngest GMs in the world, you will find ten Indians! This is something truly remarkable and shows that India has had a track record of creating young prodigious talents. The youngest players on the list who became GMs recently are well known. They are Gukesh (12y,7m,17d) Praggnanandhaa (12y,10m,13d) and Nihal Sarin (14y,1m,1d). There are some more players who achieved the feat many years ago and went on to become strong world class GMs like Harikrishna (15y,3m,5d), Parimarjan Negi (13y,4m,22d), Humpy Koneru (15y,1m,27d). And then there are those who are in between the world class players and young prodigies - they are Vaibhav Suri (15y,2m,21d), Aravindh Chithambaram (14y,9m,14d) and Aryan Chopra (14y,9m,3d).
