The night R Praggnanandhaa won Norway Chess on Magnus Carlsen’s home turf
6 min readJun 6, 2026 12:02 PM IST The meticulously-maintained silence of Oslo’s Deichman Bjørvika, the biggest public library in Norway, was shattered late on Friday evening by spontaneous applause that rang out from the fourth floor and reverberated till the ground floor. For the past two weeks, the Deichman has been even quieter than you would expect a library to be. It’s hosting the Norway Chess tournament after all and silence is non-negotiable. So much so, that at various times, volunteers have had to rush to the children’s playing area in the library to request parents to quieten their boisterous kids. Late on Friday evening, no one was bothering to hush anyone. R Praggnanandhaa, newly-minted Norway Chess champion, had just walked into one of the three broadcast studios and the 50 or so people who were waiting for him to autograph their chess boards broke into a well-deserved applause. The Indian grandmaster had won one of the strongest invitational tournaments on the calendar after a remarkable run in the second half of the 10-round …
