Bengaluru: For the greater part of this year, Arjun Erigaisi has been doing inexplicable things. He lived dangerously playing a bunch of open tournaments at the risk of losing rating points after he wasn’t invited to top closed super tournaments. He went into terminator-mode on Board 3 at the Olympiad and finished with an individual gold and an unbeaten, eye-popping 10/11 run and a career-high world No 3. This, from being ranked 30 in the world in December 2023.
On Thursday, Arjun became only the second Indian player to cross the 2800 mark, after five-time world champion Viswanathan Anand. Fellow Indian and World Championship challenger D Gukesh is on the brink of joining him. It’s a marker of how far Indian chess has travelled. The 2800 club is a rarefied one. Only 14 players in history have crossed 2800 Elo in published ratings.
Arjun had a flawless 3/3 start to the European Club Cup and touched a live rating of 2799.6 on Tuesday with a win against his former coach Victor Mikhalevski with the Black pieces. A draw on Wednesday against Alexandr Predke put the brakes briefly on his 2800 climb.
He got there anyway a day later.
On Thursday, turning out for his club Alkaloid with the White pieces in Round 5, Arjun didn’t find much of an edge out of the opening. The game meandered into a complex position Dmitry Andreikin had a strong bishop stationed in the centre while Arjun was up a pawn with more time on the clock before they made time control.
Andreikin, interestingly, ended Gukesh’s unbeaten 38-game classical run on Wednesday in a rook endgame. The ability to calculate through complex positions has been Arjun’s forte. He closed in on Black’s king with both his rooks lined up on the seventh rank. After a pawn push to h7, Black’s king on h8, was lonely, exposed and with no room for escape. Andreikin resigned soon after. Arjun who came into the game placed on 2798, crossed the 2800-mark in the live ratings with the win.
What has worked for Arjun so far is his wild, double-edged, risk-taking, attacking style—one in which his ambitions remain strong even when he’s slightly worse on the board. His experience and success against sub 2700 players at open tournaments saw him being strategically fielded on Board 3 for the Olympiad.
Arjun had a chance to cross 2800 last week at the WR Masters Cup. His French opponent in the final, Maxime Vachier Lagrave, denied him a classical win and lengthened his wait. They played out two draws in the classical before Arjun won in the Armageddon to pick up 27.84 Fide Circuit points and race into the lead. The winner of the Fide Circuit at the end of year will find a spot at next year’s Candidates.
The sting of missing out on a spot in the Candidates last time stayed with Arjun for a while. A shift in attitude, and a measure of detachment appears to have helped. “For the Candidates and the World Cup, instead of Praggnanandhaa it could have easily been me,” Arjun told HT earlier. “Again, at the Grand Swiss (Nov 2023) instead of Hikaru (Nakamura) or Vidit (Gujrathi), it could have been me. I was very close. But this tendency of caring too much was a problem. I think my performance at the clutch suffered because I was too attached. That’s why I’ve taken a conscious decision to focus just on my play and not the results.”
