Nihal Sarin stunned the chess world with his 2-0 victory against GM Jorge Cori at the first round of the World Cup 2019. People who always used to wonder how strong Nihal really is got their questions answered through his games. But how did Nihal become so strong? What are the ingredients that have helped him reach the rating of 2622 at the age of just 15 years. Ashwin Subramanian has spent time with the youngster and through his interactions with Nihal and constantly following his updates has come to the conclusion that there five factors which makes him a future World Championship contender. What are these five points? We welcome you to read the article penned down by our guest author.

In Part I of this article we saw how Ashwin Subramanian who was just an unrated player, went to the ACO World Championship in Greece, played in 1600-1800 section and won the event. He was the only unrated player in the section, but he finished ahead of all the rated players. While this was a fantastic result, the question on everyone's mind was - how did Ashwin do it? Was it plain luck, or was it meticulously planned pre-tournament preparation? It was definitely the latter and in this article we tell you all about how the 40-year-old engineer from Intel worked hard on the different chess resources out there to become a stronger chess player.