R Praggnanandhaa, one of India's top grandmasters, played seven members of the IIT Delhi chess team in one-on-one games where he had one minute on his clock compared to five minutes for them.

It is a screenshot from a chess game, taken at move 11. It shows that Shoan — a third year Electrical Engineering student at IIT Delhi and captain of its chess team — had a +3 advantage over Praggnanandhaa, one of the strongest grandmasters in the country.

A +3 advantage in chess is the equivalent of having an extra bishop or knight over your opponent — or three additional pawns on the board. A position most players would convert without thinking twice.

Shoan did not convert it.

“If it were any other opponent in front of me, I wouldn’t even think twice before playing the correct move,” he says. “But simply because I was facing Pragg, I felt like he’d played some trick. So I didn’t capitalise. There is a mental factor attached to playing one of the best players in India.”

He fumbled. Pragg won. The screenshot remains — a document of the moment a grandmaster’s reputation did the work his pieces couldn’t.

Last week, 19 players from IIT Delhi got to experience that mental factor firsthand when Praggnanandhaa visited the campus for two events organised by his sponsors IMC Trading