Hory made as Gukesh becomes youngest-ever world champion after last-ditch blunder from Ding Liren | Chess News

There is a now-viral video of Dommaraju Gukesh as an 11-year-old. In it, the boy who is yet to become a Grand Master is asked IM Sagar Shah of ChessBase India what his ambition is. “I want to become the youngest chess champion in the world,” declares the boy in his thin boyish voice with the hint of a grin on a face that is yet to have even the shadow of a moustache. About seven years after that proclamation, Gukesh has become the youngest chess champion in the world at 18, defeating Chinese Ding Liren in a battle of wills that lasted three weeks and tested both players psychologically and physically. He surpassed Garry Kasparov as the youngest.
There has been a purpose to the way that Gukesh has handled things in Singapore. It starts from the way he enters the playing hall, striding past shouting fans. Then, in the way he sits at the chessboard, shutting his eyes to enter an almost-meditative state while his opponent Ding Liren tries to find the best moves. During games, Ding often sneaks glances at his young opponent, as if seeking approval from him or trying to interpret emotions off Gukesh’s face to figure if the move he’s made on the board is a good one. But Gukesh has been inscrutable. A locked vault of emotions. Unlike most people from his generation, he has managed to spend almost three weeks in Singapore with bare minimum social media and internet usage.
He’s chasing hory after all. And in quests like these, there can be no dractions. As his youth coach, grandmaster Vishnu Prasanna, loves to point out, this is what Gukesh’s life has been since he was a kid. Everything he does is in service to that one goal: becoming a world champion.
“Somehow he was always been much more serious about chess than others in his age group even at age of 11,” Vishnu had told The Indian Express once. “I felt even then that this guy really wants to be something. He was very driven right from the start. He had a high level of desire. He would think about nothing else. Just focussed on one goal. It’s a certain obsession. Of all the kids I have worked with, nobody has shown what he has shown: an obsession about the game and to be No 1.”
In Gukesh, we have a player who calculates like his mind is powered a chip and takes risks like he had the Goddess of chess, Caissa, whispering moves in his ear.
He found himself a full point down in the first game of the world championship itself. Deflating for sure. But not when you come prepared for every single outcome. As mind guru Paddy Upton told The Indian Express, “Gukesh had memorised the entire book on playing in a world championship, right down to the minutest detail, before he went to Singapore.”
He also suffered another setback when he lost immediately after taking the lead in game 11. His response? To be the first one into the playing arena for a change in game 13. As he later said: “I was ready for a fight.”
That’s been his constant state of mind for the past three weeks.
Playing no-holds-barred chess on the board in Singapore, he frequently overestimated his position, perhaps a reflection of his opponent’s state of mind. Maybe the heady optimism of youth. Twice, he declined draws even when his opponent had the upper hand. He has been aided in part his opponent Ding Liren, the man who uneasily wears the crown on his head. The Chinese grandmaster seems to have lacked the appetite to push for a win and has been guilty of settling for draws in games 2, 4, 5 and 6 after having an upper hand.
What should be scary for the rest of the world is that even chess royalty, who are the best readers of other players, are unable to gauge what the 18-year-old’s ceiling is.
Susan Polgar had predicted many years back that Gukesh from the current Indian crop of prodigies which includes Arjun Erigaisi and R Praggnanandhaa would go the furthest.
“Some thought I was crazy for saying that… Shortly after he became a grandmaster, I saw something very special in his game, approach to chess, and demeanor. He has the important intangibles rarely seen in young players this age,” she said before adding: “Gukesh still has not hit his peak chess potential yet. Some small tweaks in a few key areas and he can dominate for years to come.”
For now, Gukesh will savour the feeling of being a world champion, a dream he has held and chased with single-minded dedication since he was 11.
The succession line of world champions in chess is now 18-men-long dating back to 1886. It has names like Bob Fischer, Garry Kasparov, Viswanathan Anand and Magnus Carlsen among them. But no one was a teenager when they became a world champion.
In his fledgling career, Gukesh has already courted plenty of hory. He is India’s youngest grandmaster, missing the tag of becoming the world’s youngest just 17 days. He’s the youngest-ever winner of the Candidates tournament, which earned him a shot at the World Championship in the first place. And he was the first Indian chess player to topple Viswanathan Anand’s 36-year stay in the world rankings as the top-ranked Indian player.

But all of those pale in contrast to what he has been able to do at Singapore.

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