Pentala Harikrishna became India’s second grandmaster in 2001, fifteen years after Viswanathan Anand earned the title and two decades before the current Indian generation reached the world top. For most of those twenty years he was the country’s number-two-ranked player — a professional who anchored Indian chess through the long structural gap between Anand and the wave that produced Gukesh, Praggnanandhaa, and Arjun Erigaisi.
Early career
Born in Guntur, Andhra Pradesh, in May 1986, Harikrishna received his first formal training at the Indian Olympic Association’s chess academy at age eight. He won the World Under-10 Championship in 1996 and a national U17 title at twelve. His IM title arrived in 2000, the GM title in September 2001 at fifteen years and two months — at the time the third-youngest grandmaster in history. The breakthrough year came in 2004 with his victory at the World Junior Championship in Cochin, a result that confirmed him as Anand’s most credible successor.
Style
His style is universal in the older Soviet-school sense: solid in defence, technical in endgames, with broad opening preparation that avoids the sharpest theoretical disputes. As Black he leans on the Petroff and the Slav; as White he plays a flexible 1.d4 repertoire with the Catalan as the main weapon. His career win rate as Black is higher than typical for elite players — a hallmark of his endgame technique, which has converted small positional edges into wins against most of the world top fifty at some point in his career.
Peak years and beyond
Harikrishna reached his peak rating of 2770 in October 2016, after strong results at the Bilbao Masters and Wijk aan Zee, briefly entering the world top ten. He spent the better part of the 2010s in the world top twenty and played a full schedule of elite round-robins through 2018. He represented India at every Olympiad from 2002 through 2024 — twelve consecutive cycles — and served as captain of the gold-medal team in Budapest 2024.
Present
He has lived in Prague since 2013, where he plays for the Czech chess league (currently for ŠK Pardubice) and coaches at a private academy. His current activity is reduced from peak years — typical for elite players past age forty — but he remains active in the European team-event circuit, gives commentary for Chess.com on major Indian events, and continues to feature in the All India Chess Federation’s training apparatus for younger players. He is widely credited within the Indian chess scene with mentoring at least three of the current Indian top ten through their junior years.