How RB Ramesh’s drills, hailed by Magnus Carlsen, sharpened the calculation skills of Praggnanandhaa and Vaishali

Just ahead of the Norway Chess tournament, while talking about Indian chess players, five-time world champion Magnus Carlsen gushed about how most Indians have “supreme calculation skills” on the chessboard. In the middle of that answer, the Norwegian, who is the top-ranked player in the world, singled out grandmaster RB Ramesh, who has played a role in shaping the careers of many youngsters like Praggnanandhaa and Vaishali. “The kids who are coached by Ramesh are also very calculation-based,” Carlsen told The Indian Express.

Now, in an interview with The Indian Express on Tuesday, just ahead of the second round of the prestigious Norway Chess tournament, Praggnanandhaa detailed an insane drill that Ramesh would get the kids to participate in which sharpened their skills on the board.

“We would make a position on the board and then start calculating from there. We would be past move 15 but we would still have the pieces in the same position on the board. We had to then visualise (the lines) in our mind. It was not just about visualisation alone, but also about finding good moves there. That helps obviously, when we’re playing some complicated game now and we’re trying to calculate ahead those drills definitely help,” Praggnanandhaa told The Indian Express on Tuesday in an exclusive interview.

In an earlier interview, Ramesh had revealed the rationale behind the drills.

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“We do a lot of sessions where we train without moving pieces on the board. Most players train by moving pieces on the board, but when you do that, your visualisation skills will not be so good. That’s why Pragg is probably the best among all the other players in his generation when it comes to visualisation,” Ramesh had said in August last year after the FIDE World Cup.

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