GUKESH D has bittersweet memories of his first brush with the World Chess Championship. The story goes that 11 years ago — when Chennai hosted the showpiece battle between Viswanathan Anand and Magnus Carlsen — Gukesh and his father were at the Hyatt Regency to get a feel of the action. There were no seats left in the playing hall that day. Not that father and son cared. They were content standing at the back and watching the action from a distance.
Gukesh was only seven years old then. All these years later, he can still visualise the spectacle of Anand and Carlsen trading pieces as they sat on the other side of a soundproof glass wall.
“I was outside, looking inside the glass box. I thought to myself it will be so cool to be inside the glass box one day,” a smiling Gukesh recollected after joining Anand and Carlsen in the ranks of world champions.
Eleven years after that innocent dream, as another battle for the world champion’s crown played out in a glass box — christened the “fishtank” by the organisers — in Singapore, Gukesh had one of the two best seats in the house – this time, inside the glass box, duelling world champion Ding Liren.
Gukesh poses with the World Chess Championship Trophy. (FIDE/Eng Chin An)
“When Magnus won that world championship by defeating Vishy sir (in Chennai), I thought I really want to be the one to bring back the title to India. This dream that I had over 10 years ago is the single-most important thing in my life so far,” added Gukesh.
***
Gukesh’s moment on the throne came rather unexpectedly. He and Ding Liren were battling in the 14th game of the world championship. With most of the pieces having left the board, the game was heading towards an undramatic draw. In the past 13 games, there had been ample drama. Ding had won Game 1, in complete mockery of all the pre-world championship naysayers. But Gukesh struck back in Game 3. Seven draws followed, in which twice Gukesh tried to force a victory simply by ignoring a draw offer and playing on, even when in a worse position on the board. While he could not win those two games, he won Game 11. The title suddenly seemed within grasp. But Ding suddenly rediscovered his appetite, winning Game 12. Anand, the last Indian to wear the crown before Gukesh (Moscow, 2012), was at home in Chennai?? when Gukesh’s crowning moment came in Game 14. Game 14 was the final game before the matter would need to be decided in a faster time control tiebreaks. Like the rest of the world and the players themselves, Anand thought that the 14th game was going to head to a draw. And then, a page turned in the book of chess history.
Ding Liren, a man who had resisted the charge of his rival addicted to attacking chess, made a blunder with his rook. A single movement of his wrist had changed the course of history.
“Sometimes history walks in when you are not expecting it to. Like on Thursday. I was kind of just sitting around, not watching the 14th world championship game between Gukesh and Ding live in the end game. I was expecting it to end in a draw at some point and the match to continue in tiebreaks the next day,” Anand tells The Indian Express. “Then suddenly, I see that Ding has blundered his way into a lost game. Boom! That was quite dramatic. In a few seconds, everything changed.”
Gukesh clinched the title with a 7.5-6.5 score in the 14th and final game, cementing his position as a global chess sensation. (FIDE/Eng Chin An via PTI Photo)
Everything’s changed for sure. Definitely for the boy who once dreamt it would be cool to be a world champion someday. And for a country of 1.4 billion that he represents which is now a bonafide chess powerhouse. And for the sport itself, which has been awaiting the era of the Indian chess prodigies to begin.
“18 is just an unbelievable age to become world champion,” Anand says.
None of the previous occupants of the throne — be it Bobby Fischer, Garry Kasparov, Viswanathan Anand or Magnus Carlsen — were anywhere close to even fighting for the title at 18.
“There’s probably nothing better than this. I’m just living my dream,” grinned Gukesh. “This means a lot to me. It probably meant a lot more to that eight-year-old Gukesh than it does to me right now. Because at some point I stopped thinking about things like the youngest ever and such stuff. I had mentioned in an interview when I was eight that I wanted to be the youngest world champion in the world. Now that I have got here, that eight-year-old kid would be very happy.”
***
After Gukesh lost the first game to Ding in Singapore — he recalled that moment as being “a bit humiliating” — the balm came from his mentor Anand in a lift ride in their hotel. “Anand sir said, ‘I had 11 games. You have 13,’” recollected Gukesh.
India’s D Gukesh, right, and China’s Ding Liren during the 13th game of the FIDE World Chess Championship 2024, in Singapore. (PTI)
Anand was reminding the teenager about his own bruising opening game defeat to Veselin Topalov in the first game of the 2010 world championship, where Anand had eventually prevailed – the world championship was then a best of 12 games.
In the past year, as Gukesh had plotted his way to becoming the world champion, it was Anand who guided him with tweaks that changed the teenager’s career trajectory. It was Anand’s idea that Gukesh hire Grzegorz Gajewski as a full-time trainer. Gajewski had helped Anand during his own world championship battles and knew what the Polish grandmaster brought to the table. Anand’s assessment was that Gukesh needed to develop his opening game, and there was no one better than Gajewski to do it.
Ever since the duo started working together around January 2023, Gukesh’s career graph has not paused even for air. The Polish grandmaster and a battery of seconds (assistants for big-ticket matches in chess) have been arming Gukesh with one vicious opening prep after another before he walks into the games. Which is why, almost in every game in Singapore, Ding has been spending as much as an hour on his clock in the opening phases just to tiptoe his way past the landmines his opponent has buried on the treacherous terrain of the 64 squares.
At the world championship, Gukesh has not conceded an inch to his rival in any of the 14 games, whether on the board or in his body language. For the past three weeks, the Indian has been unlike any teenager in the world: he cut himself off from social media and the internet largely to focus on the world championship.
“I’m proud of how consistent I have been… in the way I live. In teenage years chess is not the only thing. But I have managed to keep distractions away and focus,” said Gukesh.
India’s D Gukesh reacts after beating title-holder China’s Ding Liren in the 14th and last game of the FIDE World Chess Championship 2024, in Singapore, Thursday, Dec. 12, 2024. (India’s D Gukesh reacts after beating title-holder China’s Ding Liren in the 14th and last game of the FIDE World Chess Championship 2024, in Singapore, Thursday, Dec. 12, 2024. (FIDE/Eng Chin An via PTI Photo)
This ability to keep distractions away has been a trademark since he was a child. Grandmaster Vishnu Prasanna, who shaped Gukesh in his formative years after starting to work with him at the age of 11, once pointed out why Gukesh’s rise had been meteoric even in a sport like chess, where every fourth player has been a prodigy.
“The first thing I noticed about him was the emotional maturity he had even at the age of 11. There was a certain hunger to learn. He was completely different from others at that age. He was always much more serious about chess than others in his age group,” Vishnu had told The Indian Express recently. “While others in the training group would joke around and want to play blitz games, Gukesh was always super serious – even at 11! He would never take any game, even a blitz game, lightly. I thought, okay, this guy really wants to be something. He was very driven right from the start,” says Vishnu.
***
He has been at his driven, inscrutable best in Singapore, his visage largely a poker face, win, loss or draw. He also has been ruthless on the board, chasing victory even if conventional wisdom would have told him to take a draw and live to play another day.
“My whole strategy for this match has been to push as much as possible for wins with both colours in every single game. Even if it didn’t work in most games, at least it was tiring him out,” he said.
India’s D Gukesh during the 14th game of the FIDE World Chess Championship 2024 against China’s Ding Liren, in Singapore, Thursday, Dec. 12, 2024. (FIDE/Eng Chin An via PTI Photo)
After winning the title, it all changed. The impassive boy on the board started to sob, on multiple occasions. Once at the board. Then when he met his father. Then again when he spoke to his mother on the phone. One of the running jokes on Twitter when he was playing at the Candidates tournament earlier this year was about him never smiling. After becoming the world champion, he could not stop smiling.
In the midst of the overwhelming tsunami of emotions, he does not forget his upbringing that makes him respectful. So while he sobs uncontrollably at the board after sealing his victory, he remembers to stand up to greet FIDE president Arkady Dvorkovich as the Russian walks up to him to congratulate him. At the press conference, after his vanquished rival is done with his piece and walks away, Gukesh is again the first to rise on his feet and applaud Ding. He keeps standing and keeps applauding until Ding is out of the room from the exit at the other end.
With Ding out of earshot, he finally settles in his chair and then goes on a long speech about how Ding is a “true champion”. He’s not done. The next day, at the closing ceremony, he walks on stage to collect his trophy, and again decides to pay a tribute to his rival without being prodded to.
“Ding Liren is in my eyes a true champion and we saw that despite a lot of pressure on him, he was able to put on a huge fight. This match has been the show it is because of his fighting spirit. I really admire you,” Gukesh told Ding from the stage.
This is a pleasant change to the way business has historically been conducted on the world championship stage, where every under-hand tactic to destabilise your opponent has been employed: from wild allegations to employing para-psychologists or hypnotists to rattle the man across the board. Gukesh and Ding preferred to keep their fight on the board.
India’s D Gukesh during the 14th game of the FIDE World Chess Championship 2024 against China’s Ding Liren, in Singapore, Thursday, Dec. 12, 2024. (FIDE/Eric Rosen via PTI Photo)
There is the Gukesh the world sees on its screen, the most serious 18-year-old in the world. And then, when tournaments end, a switch gets flicked and Gukesh acts every bit his age. This was the Gukesh the world had seen at the Chess Olympiad in Budapest as well, when he had led the Indian chess team to a history-making team gold and claimed an individual gold medal as well. At that event too, Gukesh had uncharacteristically broken into dance showing off his footwork at the trophy ceremony.
A single-minded pursuit of his target has always been Gukesh’s greatest forte since he was barely tall enough to reach the other end of the chess board to make a move. He dropped out of school in Class 4 as he chased success on the board.
He is asked about sacrifices he has had to make in his journey. “I can’t say I have personally made many sacrifices in life. This is what I have always wanted to do. So I wouldn’t have it any other way,” he says before steering the conversation in the direction of his parents.
His father, Dr Rajini Kanth, made the tough decision to give up on his own practice as an ENT surgeon to travel with Gukesh as his career was taking off.
“The most sacrifices came from them (parents). Once I started growing, they had to face a lot of financial struggles. We were not really well off at that point. In 2017 and 2018, we were running so low on money that my parents’ friends came forward and sponsored me to play tournaments. All of this my parents had to endure. Just for me to get a chance to play chess,” he said.
Then, without missing a beat, he reminds the world of other sacrifices: those in his team of seconds — like Grzegorz Gajewski, Radoslaw Wojtaszek and Pentala Harikrishna — who are also fathers to young children and have been spending a lot of time helping him out.
***
Gukesh’s win is the finale to a year that started with an unprecedented five Indians competing at the Candidates tournament in Toronto. It was here that Gukesh won the right to challenge Ding for the throne.
India’s D Gukesh, left, and China’s Ding Liren during the 13th game of the FIDE World Chess Championship 2024, in Singapore, Wednesday, Dec. 11, 2024. (FIDE/Maria Emelianova via PTI Photo)
After the Candidates, the legendary Garry Kasparov had famously remarked, “The Indian earthquake in Toronto is the culmination of the shifting tectonic plates in the chess world… The ‘children’ of Vishy Anand are on the loose!”
The Indians have been on the prowl alright! At the Chess Olympiad, an event where there is participation from over 180 nations, Indian chess teams swept both team gold medals. There were also four individual golds. Besides Gukesh, Arjun Erigaisi has also been taking the world by storm, after touching the 2800-rating mark.
There are audacious whispers in chess circles that the next world championship could see another Indian sitting in front of Gukesh. “I would love that… to play against another Indian in the world championship,” said the world champion.
A moment like this has the potential to change the landscape of the sport, both in India and world over.
“He will inspire millions of kids around the globe, especially in India! He will be the best chess ambassador ever!” gushed chess legend Susan Polgar on X. “Chess is in a great place!”
Why should you buy our Subscription?
You want to be the smartest in the room.
You want access to our award-winning journalism.
You don’t want to be misled and misinformed.
Choose your subscription package
