Excerpted with permission from The Price of Genius: Inside the World of India’s Chess Prodigies, published by Juggernaut.‘I think my opponent is a genius,’ said GM Wesley So, after what may have been mathematically the most unlikely loss in history for a player at the highest level of rapid chess. So’s opponent, Pragg, was rated over a thousand points lower, which gave him less than 1 per cent chance at a win. Yet, Pragg had outplayed the Filipino-American GM in an endgame to beat the odds. What is even more amazing was that Pragg was only 12 years old, the second-youngest player to ever become GM – which is equivalent to a PhD in Chess – and the youngest one at the time this game was played in the 2018 León Masters in Spain.Binit PriyaranjanThe Price of Genius: Inside the World of India’s Chess ProdigiesJuggernaut, 2025Pragg’s achievements, coupled with his age, put him firmly in the category of prodigies, often conflated with ‘child geniuses’ in the popular imagination, even though the two terms mean different things. For example, a 60 Minutes episode on prodigies from mathematics, music, chess and so on, broadcast in 2018 used the words ‘prodigy’ and ‘genius’ interchangeably, and included among its line-up of young prodigies the ‘Mozart of Chess’, Magnus Carlsen. Carlsen was the odd-one-out among the list not because he was not a prodigy, but because he was 28 years old and the reigning World Chess Champion at the time. Carlsen had, as an adult, elevated himself to the status of a genuine genius at chess.His fellow guests on the show were, ‘children who, by about age 10, perform at the level of a highly trained adult in a particular sphere of activity or knowledge’. They were prodigies by definition, but they had not produced anything new and substantial enough within their field to warrant the mytho-historical mantle of ‘genius’, which should be reserved only for those who reach the stratospheres of cultural and intellectual achievement. Geniuses are once-in-a-generation individuals with ‘the power to create, redeem and destroy; the power to penetrate the fabric of the universe […]’ in the words of historian Darrin M. McMahon, author of Divine Fury: A History of Genius, a book about the power and allure the word has had on the public imagination all the way from ancient religions to the present age.In large part, the misuse of the ‘G-word’ in advertising, media and PR sections for far too many novelists, poets, designers, musicians and so on is owed to these mythical connotations. Prodigies are childrenwho are potential geniuses – obvious shining beacons among a sea of fused bulbs; those born with the lightwithin them, so to speak. Prodigies, the younger the better, are ‘gifted’ by God with a talent as opposed to the vast multitudes of us normal people born empty-handed, and it is for this reason that they capture our attention. The ancients had the notion that geniuses are born different from the rest, marked from the herd by a divine sign the likes of which every prodigy displays in their early years. The relics of this belief leads us to expect that every prodigiously gifted child will become a genius.However, to put it in the words of John Green, ‘Prodigies can very quickly learn what other people have already figured out; geniuses discover that which no one has ever previously discovered. Prodigies learn; geniuses do.’ This is, for example, what Carlsen has done in his career, becoming (probably) the best player of all time and elevating the game in the process with his creative performances. There is no telling if his peers on the show will go on to achieve the same in their respective fields, except that it can be (and obviously is) expected from them. Nowhere is this clearer than in the field of chess, where the stark differences between prodigy and genius are illustrated to perfection by a legendary true story.Grandmaster Samuel Reshevsky (1911–1992) was the poster-child for child prodigies in the 1920s. He was giving simultaneous exhibitions to dozens of people by the age of six, and was clearly a gifted chess player. He was a darling of the media, playing thousands of simultaneous and individual exhibition games all across the globe and hailed everywhere as a shining talent. Indeed, Reshevsky improved on his abilities as he grew up. He became a very strong GM and competed many times in the Candidates Tournaments for the World Championship.Yet, he never became a World Champion, and his feats were superseded by one Bobby Fischer, who became the youngest GM in history and went on to become the World Champion and a universally acknowledged genius. However, Fischer had started playing chess later than Reshevsky. There was little apparent difference between the two in terms of chess strength in their early years, and it would have been impossible to predict who would achieve more in future.Wesley So, who was himself a prodigy and a former World No. 2 is aware of the difference between prodigy and genius. His comments (mentioned earlier) indicate that he thinks Pragg has pierced this barrier, but like with any other prodigious talent only time can (and will) tell if his judgement is correct.Whatever might lie in the future, the prodigies, and more importantly their guardians, must take a Kierkegaardian ‘leap of faith’ in the present if they are to devote a life to actualizing their talent and attaining the improbable. That decision may be based on the extraordinary gift and the vision of a pre-teen, guided by elders and coaches, of course. Nevertheless, no one can guarantee the results of this leap, which must be made with heart, mind and soul as early as possible if the target is to be achieved at all. None of the prodigies I interviewed, coming up through their pre-teen and early-teen years, displayed the slightest hesitation at having made their choice to pursue chess greatness at the cost of all other priorities. Nor did they display any concern about the astronomical odds stacked against them in their pursuit of excellence. They simply loved chess and wanted to get as good at it as humanly possible.