Time owned by ESPN Long conversation with Dommaraju Gukesh Last year he was on the verge of breaking into the world’s top 10 in the rankings. He had already earned a number of age-related records to his name, but his goals were relatively modest. “I would like to see myself competing seriously on the World Championship cycle in a few years,” he said. “First of all, I want to qualify for the Candidates tournament. I believe I have a fair chance and I will do my best.”

It took less than a year to achieve both of these goals. At the end of 2023, he qualified for the Candidates competition, which was held in Toronto in April of this year. He won that tournament and will challenge Ding Liren for the world title ten days later; At 18, he is the youngest player to appear in a World Championship match.

It’s hard to overstate the extent of the achievement: even Magnus Carlsen, arguably the greatest player of all time, spent almost a decade on the FIDE circuit before finally making it to a World Championship match. Gukesh has been playing at the top level of the FIDE circuit for nearly three years.

It’s a striking, dramatic rise that surprised even Viswanathan Anand, who observed Gukesh’s career from a close range. “You know, I didn’t have a specific scenario but I didn’t give it a very high probability of him getting to this point so early,” Anand, India’s only world chess champion so far, told ESPN earlier this month.

Given his status in Indian chess, it is not surprising that Anand is where Gukesh’s career effectively began. His first glimpse of high-level chess came in November 2013, when, at the age of 7, he accompanied his father Rajnikanth to watch the FIDE World Championship match between Anand and Magnus Carlsen. The idea was to give the child the feeling of a sport that he had just started doing as a hobby.

Eleven years later, the boy has (almost) grown into a man and is playing a good game of chess, just weeks away from becoming the youngest world champion the sport has ever had.

It is easy to say that Gukesh always strives for perfection. After all, he was (and still is) India’s youngest grandmaster: third youngest grandmaster in the world, third youngest to reach 2700 rating, youngest to reach 2750 rating, 18th highest rating. highest rated player of all time, multiple Olympic gold medalist. However, as with any successful athlete, it was a mix of hard work, meticulous preparation and a lot of effort that got him here – and it also helped that, in his own words, Gukesh loved the sport. “I love the fact that chess is so complex,” he told his YouTube channel Buy Buy Buy. “There are things to learn every day.”

He was absolutely obsessed with it as a kid. “This man had to be taken out of his system or his chess book or his board to even get him to eat or sleep when he started,” Rajnikanth said. Buy Buy Buy. In part this was due to the culture in which he found himself. Chennai is known as the chess capital of India, but despite this elite atmosphere, Gukesh’s school, Velammal Vidyalaya, is a step ahead of the rest. This is the alma mater of 16 of India’s chess grandmasters; Its latest graduates include R Praggnanandhaa and R Vaishali, the first brother and sister to win GM titles.

Chess was given priority here over academics, a rarity in any Indian educational institution. The top chess talents at the school were even given the flexibility to reschedule exams around their own chess schedules. This freedom allowed Gukesh to become a true student of the game and probably helped him develop the style that would break all these age records.

Early Gukesh had an aggressive and ambitious playing style; According to his father Rajnikanth, he was influenced by Magnus Carlsen. Rajnikanth observed that although Anand was always an inspiration, as Gukesh started getting better and better, he began to observe that Carlsen was unlike anyone who had ever played chess.

Gukesh also had from an early age a rare and extremely subtle knack for calculation that even Carlsen commented on; He observed that Gukesh had the ability to calculate lines that he had not even thought of. All these skills combined helped him break all these records and dominate the junior circuit with multiple gold medals at the World Junior Championships and Asian Junior Championships.

Carlsen noticed this special talent early in the match between the two in the Champions Chess Tour in 2021. Buy Buy Buy He said Gukesh felt there was something special about him. But then he made a more important observation: he felt that Gukesh did not have the strength to maintain his level. His all-out attacking style needed more: It needed solidity.

The best players have multidimensional games that can work in any situation. For example, Carlsen’s standard style is aggressive and ambitious, but when toughness was added to this, he became even harder to beat. Carlsen, for example, played 56 classic matches in five world championship matches and lost only two. He played six rapid tiebreak games (against Sergey Karjakin in 2016 and Fabiano Caruana in 2018) and did not lose any of them.

Perhaps Carlsen’s comment worked because Gukesh then realized the need to change his game.

GM Srinath Narayanan, coach of the Indian team that won the gold medal at this year’s Chess Olympics, says he has always known Gukesh as an aggressive player and that his style led to several defeats in his early years. “He was able to learn and grow from them. I think it’s also important to be tough… Gukesh has also developed that skill over the last few years,” Srinath told ESPN.

Srinath observes that Gukesh’s style is a sign of changing times in chess, with players tending to move away from the best moves suggested by computers and patterns established in the past.

“By default, if you see the highest-scoring players in tournaments, you generally won’t find them ranked highest in terms of accuracy or percentage of the computer’s first-choice moves,” Srinath says. “You try to find unorthodox ways, and as you do that, of course, your precision percentage drops, which isn’t really a problem. It’s just the accepted way of trying to increase your chances of winning.”

The 2022 Chess Olympiad in Chennai is a point in Gukesh’s career that seems to have left a deep mark on him and is a tournament that has truly established him as one of the best players. However, despite his individual gold medal, it is a tournament he does not look back on fondly.

Gukesh had won his first eight matches on board 1 himself and his team comprising Nihal Sarin, B Adhiban, Praggnanandhaa and Raunak Sadhwani were leading the competition. However, the title slipped away from India in the last few rounds and Gukesh took just one point in their last three matches. The gold medal on the 1st ship was no consolation for missing the big trophy.

But soon after that he began to make great strides on the FIDE circuit. A month after the Olympics, its rating reached 2700. A month after that he beat Carlsen.

He became the youngest player to reach 2750 ratings in 2023 and qualified for the Candidates at the end of the year thanks to his performances on the FIDE circuit.

There were five players (out of eight total) ranked higher than Gukesh at the Candidates tournament held in Toronto in April. This statistic alone increased the odds against him. But he won in style, losing just once in 14 matches. In fact, in the business part of the tournament, Gukesh won two of his last three matches against Nijat Abasov and Alireza Firouzja despite the pressure of the tournament leaderboard. He showed his best game when the pressure was most intense.

The icing on the cake came a few months later when India won the Chess Olympiad in Budapest; It’s a consolation for the “tragedy” of Gukesh’s 2022 edition. Gukesh was at the forefront of India’s championship race with nine points out of ten. He defended his gold medal in the 1st ship, but this time he had the smile and swagger of being the team champion.

2024 Chess Olympiad Champions ������

Edit: Abhyudaya Ram #chess #chessbaseindia #ChessOlympics pic.twitter.com/R9OhPH1ntR

– ChessBase India (@ChessbaseIndia) September 23, 2024

Gukesh’s wins over Fabiano Caruana and Wei Yi and his incredible performance score of 3056 made it one of the greatest individual tournaments ever played in the sport.

This win also underlined to the doubters that he was a worthy contender for the world championship. This was another clear indication that he could be at his best in crucial moments and win almost on demand against some of the best players in the world.

So what makes Gukesh so good?

talking friends Buy Buy Buyoffered his own views: “He always has a ready-to-kill attitude,” says Arjun Erigaisi. “He is a warrior,” says Praggnanandha. “He wants to compete in every game.”

Vidit Gujrathi was more detailed and insightful. “He has the spark that we see in the champions, that we see in Garry Kasparov, Magnus and all the greats. He has a championship mentality. This is clearly seen in all his actions, in his thoughts. He is very mature for his age. After the tournaments, he is a completely different person, more relaxed and calmer. “But like during tournaments during game time, he doesn’t want to mess around.”

His style (attack, ambition and toughness) is of course crucial to his success, but both Anand and Srinath point to another aspect: his composure.

It is rare to see Gukesh express any emotion on the chessboard. on did this on rare occasionsJust like after his loss to Firouzja in the Candidates tournament, his trademark stoic demeanor as he held his head in his hands gave way to an expression of utter devastation. But his reaction was swift, he found a way to come back even stronger and won the tournament.

In fact, Gukesh later described this defeat as the moment when he truly realized he could win the competition. “If I had to pinpoint a moment where I felt like it could be me, it was after losing to Firouzja, obviously I was upset after that, but on the rest day following the match I was definitely feeling in my best shape,” Gukesh said. in question.

This is a quality that Anand, who has a close relationship with Gukesh through the Westbridge-Anand Chess Academy (WACA), which supports him, truly admires. Anand told ESPN that the difference between the Candidates is their ability to stay calm and the strength and composure to seize the opportunity when it comes.

Rajnikanth says his son’s greatest strength is his work ethic, but Gukesh downplayed this, saying he was just doing what he loved most.

His calm and composed nature will be fully tested during the approximately 20 days spent in Singapore. World championships can turn into chaotic affairs, like last year’s match between Ding and Ian Nepomniachtchi. Rajnikanth stated that Ding came out and won the match despite his less-than-ideal mentality before the match, so there are no illusions in Gukesh’s camp about the magnitude of the challenge that awaits them.

But with this great challenge comes the chance to write his name in the history books. “Ever since I was a little kid, I thought it would be really cool to be there (as world champion). Now I have this opportunity and I’m grateful for it,” Gukesh said recently.

Only one Indian has become a world champion so far. No one has ever become a world champion as a teenager (or at 20 or 21). Ding Liren prevents this, but come mid-December the youngster has the opportunity to make history in his sport.