FIDE World Chess Championship: About glances at the opponent and pre-game rituals | Chess News

As the tension mounted on him in Game 7, Ding Liren sneaked a couple of glances at D Gukesh as he contemplated his next move. The 18-year-old in front of the world champion has not noticed Ding’s furtive looks. He is in a meditative trance with his eyes shut. It’s become something of a tic for the boy from Chennai on the board. Each time he finds himself on the board with his opponent’s clock running, he tends to shut his eyes and calculate.
“I’m in a room where there’s nothing else to see. So I close my eyes,” Gukesh had said after the previous game. “I close my eyes quite often during games. Sometimes, it is just that it’s easier to calculate with your eyes closed. So mostly just thinking about the position.”
A couple of games back, the FIDE broadcast started calculating how much time Gukesh spends with his eyes shut on the board and how much time the players are spending away from their playing chairs. Grandmaster David Howell, a regular in the commentary booth, informed that this data is collected using Artificial Intelligence.
Just then, Ding steals another glance at his zen-like opponent.
Ukrainian grandmaster Anna Muzychuk, the special guest during the FIDE broadcast on Tuesday, chuckled as she suggested that the organisers of the 2024 World Chess Championship use AI to calculate how much time Ding has spent eyeing his opponent.
“In the first game (of the world championship), the better Ding’s position was, the more often he started to stare at Gukesh. That was my impression. Sometimes, you just do it without thinking. Other times we do it on purpose,” she said with a glint in her eye.
When asked if there were other tricks grandmasters use to psych out their opponents, she said: “When I was a kid, there were many tricks. Looking at one part of the board and pretending that the most important thing is happening there. But creating a threat on the other side.”
Pre-game rituals
In the middle of Game 1, the Chess24 broadcast pointed out that Gukesh had spent some part of the morning solving puzzles on the chess.com app with a feature called Puzzle Rush.
Apparently, the 18-year-old had hit a score of 53 in the three-minute puzzle rush in the morning, just short of his record of 58.
Gukesh was asked if he had a specific pre-game routine and if he had any rituals.
“Not much. I just try to follow a specific routine. Puzzle Rush is always nice to do to warm up my mind,” said Gukesh.

Ding is then asked if he has any pre-game routines.
“I get up. I shower. I then have some coffee,” he grins awkwardly.