NEW DELHI: The soft thud of a yellow smiley-face sponge ball striking the floor again and again barely disturbed the silence of a five-star hotel room, where 18-year-old Pranav Venkatesh and his coach, GM Shyam Sundar M, were putting up during the Chennai Masters in November last year.
Standing tall with a table tennis racquet — now a makeshift cricket bat — Pranav had already transformed his room into the quietest battleground ever. And if there was no sponge ball or table tennis racquet? No problem! The student-teacher duo would improvise, turning a bottle cap into a ball and the bottle into a bat, maximising the use of their limited resources.
It is a familiar sight of Pranav staying with his mentor before a major tournament.
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It is unconventional, but it works. Cricket, often seen by the mentor as a break from the mental grind, has become part of Pranav’s preparation routine for chess.
“Cricket, badminton, any sport… we play it all in the room,” Shyam, who couldn’t travel to Montenegro to witness his student clinch the World Junior Chess Championship title due to visa issues, told TimesofIndia.com during an exclusive conversation.
A chess connection found in the field of cricket
Pranav’s journey to becoming the junior world chess champion, interestingly, began on a cricket field a year ago.
Shyam, who runs his chess academy, Chess Thulir, in Chennai near Perambur, often plays cricket with his students to bond with them and keep them physically active.
“Pranav came to play cricket a few times, just like any other teenager,” Shyam recalled with a chuckle. “Back then, he wasn’t even training for chess with me.”
But that soon changed.
Though he had trained with other coaches in the past, it was only after his father approached Shyam that their serious chess journey began.
“We started working together officially around January last year,” Shyam noted. “By then, Pranav was already a grandmaster. But my goal was to take him to the next level.”
Thus began a year of intense training, where Shyam sought to balance Pranav’s natural skill in fast-paced formats like rapid and blitz with the endurance needed for longer, more gruelling classical games.
“It’s like T20 cricket versus Test cricket,” Shyam explained. “You can hit the ball out of the park in T20, but in Test cricket, you need patience to play the long game. Similarly, in chess, Pranav was brilliant at quick formats, but I wanted him to master the longer formats too.”
Pranav, already recognised for his acumen in blitz games — having even defeated top players like Magnus Carlsen in online matches — had to channel his instinct for speed into a more methodical approach.
However, the transition wasn’t easy.
‘The first few months a process of trial and error’
“Initially, it took some time. We worked together for two months, and then he went to Spain to play a few events. It didn’t go well, which was expected because I need time to understand any player I work with. The first few months are always a process of trial and error — getting to know their psychology and approach. So, the first two or three months didn’t go very well,” Shyam told TimesofIndia.com. “Once I started to know him much better, it went very well. He was winning events like the Dubai Police Championship and Sharjah Masters.”
These victories, though impressive, were just the beginning.
By December 2024, Pranav had qualified for the prestigious Chennai Masters Tournament after winning the Chennai Challenges Invitational.
It was at this event that the coach-player duo cemented their unique pre-match routine, which included playing cricket in hotel rooms to relax before a match.
“We used to play cricket in the room with a bottle cap, stress balls, whatever was available,” Shyam said, laughing. “The idea was to keep Pranav relaxed.”
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Pranav, a boy of few words, has remained humble throughout this period. With no presence on social media, he is managed well by his father, Venkatesh, who often travels with him to different countries for tournaments.
Pranav’s final push for glory
Shyam, being a grandmaster himself, was not unaware that the pressure was mounting on Pranav, especially as he prepared for his ultimate challenge: the 2025 World Junior U20 Chess Championship in Petrovac, Montenegro.
As the tournament neared, preparing for the tournament was getting tricky. “Just before the tournament, we had a few online sessions. Initially, we had planned to play different openings,” Shyam admitted. “But it wasn’t just a rigid plan A, B, or C. Plan A didn’t feel quite right, so we adjusted. What was originally Plan B and C became Plan A.”
But as the tournament kicked off, Shyam reflected, “He started strong, and once he took a one-point lead, he maintained it and converted his chances well.”
His final-round draw against Matic Lavrencic, securing a score of 9/11, sealed the victory and solidified Pranav’s status as one of the brightest young stars in the chess world.
“I spoke to him after the final round,” Shyam recalled, his voice filled with pride. “He was always confident. He told me, ‘Come on, don’t you know this is my kind of position? How could I mess this up?'”
But for Shyam, the nerves were unavoidable. “During the last round, I was so anxious that I went to the temple. I had to switch off the internet, of course. After coming out, I turned my data back on, and there it was—he messaged, ‘I won the tournament.’ I just thought, ‘Thank God!’”
Winning the World Junior Chess Championship — a title previously held by none other than Viswanathan Anand — has been the summit of Pranav’s career so far.
The journey, however, wasn’t just about winning.
It was about the bond built over shared games of cricket, the relentless training, and the mutual respect between coach and student.
“We speak the same regional language — Tamil — so we get along very well. We crack jokes, and he’s like an innocent kid. He doesn’t have many distractions,” said the 32-year-old coach. “It’s a good relationship. He watches a lot of comedy movies, so we use movie references while joking.”
As Pranav stood on the podium in Montenegro, a smile on his face, trophy in hand, he looked back — not just at the hours spent hunched over a chessboard, but also at those moments in hotel rooms, where the sound of a bottle cap hitting the wall did little to disturb others.