[yashap]

This context would certainly be great in the article, but I still feel it’s newsworthy. Assuming the article is correct, he’s the youngest player ever to beat Magnus since he became World Champion in 2013 - that alone is worth noticing.

He’s also the 6th youngest chess grandmaster ever, so it’s not like he’s a nobody, he’s a legit prodigy. Plus India has traditionally not been a strong chess nation (per capita), but has been up and coming recently, so that adds to the appeal of the story.

[screye]

I mean, per capita, India is terrible at everything. We are much better at chess than say soccer or Basketball.

[herodoturtle]

Your cricket is world class though ^_^

[harry8]

Ask your Indian friends about the national cricket team of New Zealand in world cup & world test competition (yeah, I know), then work out the per-capita of that contest.

India probably have the best cricket team in the world right now and they have depth. Their second eleven might be in the top 5. They are awesome and a period of India being the top dog is a good thing for cricket. (Some friendly played, properly tense games against Pakistan would make it even better, we can't have everything).

   India pop 1,380 million
   NZ pop 5 million
   Norway also about 5 million

[Fnoord]

True, we tend to forget the size of the population when we compare countries. But we should also not forget that someone from a rich country has a higher chance to get funding for sports.

[harry8]

Absolutely wealth is critical and way, way beyond funding. You don't play at a serious level as a kid if you're genuinely poor for so many reasons. A poorer, more populous, country with higher density living has relatively much more expensive access to playing fields. In chess it's more likely to be a function of tradition, interest, free time & resource availability (computers seem like they might be important but wtf would I know about it or how many in India have readily available access to play games?) Potentially health & nutrition of pregnant mothers could play some part in some of it for some individuals and may not be equivalent across all national borders. Domestic culture and whatever class and or caste system is influential in getting access to playing in the best competitions as a junior really matters.

New Zealand is wealthy, has more playing fields than they can use, anyone who wants to can afford to play and is welcomed - even more so if they can join in and help /us/ beat those bastards from across town for whatever value of across town is most relevant to the particular team. There's a metric fudge-tonne of old cranky bastards who want to tell you what to do to do it better, not all of them are useless either. At least that's my read as a foreigner who visited once. The proportion of New Zealanders who trace their heritage to the sub-continent is likely pretty small (wikipedia says 5%). The proportion of the New Zealand national cricket team who trace their heritage to the sub-continent is quite large in comparison (~30% depending on who is selected this week?) There was a test match recently between India and NZ where all the wickets in the match were taken by people tracing their heritage to India. Cultural tradition might have something to say about that too.

Likewise Norway is close to the richest country per capita in the world. Hard to think of anywhere you'd rather be if you were bringing up kids and in the bottom 10% of wealth & income. If your kid takes an interest in chess they are likely to be able to pursue it, is my guess (Norwegians can pipe up to say how ignorant I am if necessary). Not true everywhere in the world.

[robofanatic]

What’s the point in comparing the number of people living in India and Norway or NZ?

[harry8]

None really beyond interest, amusement.

@screye picked per capita as a measure. @herodoturtle pointed out how good India are at cricket right now. Seemed interesting and fun to combine those especially given recent cricket results and that basically nobody lives in NZ? Sometimes following these digressions leads somewhere interesting, informative, instructive and entertaining. Not always.

[aloisdg]

Same in Kabaddi

[Abishek_Muthian]

India does quite well in free style wrestling too, Both men and women[1].

India ranks 3rd in field hockey(men)[2]. Women's team is doing well recently too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrestling_in_India

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_hockey_in_India

[OJFord]

I'd never heard of it before I saw SRK playing with/against the sea in Dear Zindagi. So now that's the image I have when I read a comment like yours, and it takes me a minute to remember what it actually is!

[revel]

just putting it out there as a random foreigner that happened to watch kabaddi randomly on tv while travelling -- kabaddi rules! Great spectator sport

[ComradePhil]

I have played Kabaddi as a kid but somehow never imagined that it was televised. Looked for clips of Pro Kabbadi League on YouTube and couldn't help but laugh out loud because of it being presented as a serious sport with commentators and everything.

[tialaramex]

Any sport with coherent rules is no different about whether it may qualify as a "serious sport". Baseball looks pretty stupid to me as a European, and satires of Cricket often portray that as complete nonsense although it does have laws setting down exactly how it works.

In the end what matters to perception may be the attendant fuss, as you say with commentators and organised competition, but I grew up with the Football Pyramid†, which provokes healthy distrust of such things in trying to define a sport.

† Unlike with US sports like the NFL, in England Soccer is organised in a vast sprawling hierarchy of leagues, the Pyramid, with a system for teams to be promoted from a lower league to a higher one, or contrariwise demoted to a lower league, depending on their performance each season. Anybody can start at the bottom, if they can put together a group of people to turn up and play. In principle a group of friends or colleagues could create a new side, "Speen and Dean FC", that was just ridiculously good, and get promoted every season, until after a few yeares they were playing against semi-professionals, and then facing actual professional footballers in stadiums, and then playing internationals, it's all possible. Incredibly unlikely of course, but possible. And so this emphasises that actually the game you're playing kick-about with some friends, is the exact same game somebody gets paid eyewatering sums of money to play on national TV. If it's a "serious sport" is clearly just a matter of perspective.

[prox]

Never knew about that sport, looks pretty cool!

[baybal2]

Nodirbek was also a teenager when he first defeated him (and no, his last win wasn't the first, but first on a tournament of this level.) Norwegian supercomputer is still a human, and he has bad days.