A teenager rises to the pinnacle of chess, “the oldest, most fascinating, complicated, and terrible game,” as Marcel Duchamps defined it, that exists. India is celebrating with Dommaraju Gukesh, who at 18 1/2 years old became the youngest-ever world champion in unified titles, (FIDE: Fédération Internationale des Échecs), a record that had belonged to Russian legend Garry Kasparov since 1985. In the Singapore final, he beat 32-year-old Liren Ding of China, who had captured the trophy in 2023. The evenly balanced match seemed destined for the tiebreakers but was resolved with a coup de théâtre at the finish line. Gukesh, born in Chennai on May 29, 2006, whose father is an otolaryngologist and mother a microbiologist, has an innate talent. He started playing at age seven, a little later than other child prodigies. But he blazed the trail, winning everything at the youth level before winning four medals (three gold) at the Olympics. He reached the Grandmaster title in 2019 at 12 years, seven months and 17 days. In the eight-candidate tournament, he had knocked off Italian-American favorite Fabiano Caruana, the eternal second-place challenger for the rainbow crown in 2018.
Gukesh is the second Indian to win the title after the sacred monster Viswanathan Anand, born in Gukesh’s same city 55 years ago, who was dominant from 2007 until the advent in 2013 of the unbeatable Norwegian ace, Magnus Carlsen: Vishy, as they call him, was a six-time chess Oscar winner and is still tenth in the rankings. Congratulations have come from politicians, sportsmen, Bollywood stars, and hundreds of thousands of fans. Premier Narendra Modi defined Guky as an “exemplary athlete for commitment and determination.” In short, he is the success story of an entire nation. The boy genius, who took home a check for 1.3 million dollars, prevailed 7.5 to 6.5. In the fourteenth and decisive game, closed in 58 moves, the opponent’s glaring oversight was decisive. Ding made a rookie mistake, according to the coaches’ commentary, as the match was headed for a draw, such a blunder that even the winner was surprised. “When he played Rf2, I didn’t notice it right away. Then I saw that his bishop was in danger of being trapped and I set him up. It’s a dream, the best moment of my life,” Gukesh commented. Then the honor of arms to the loser, who was in shock after the blunder: “I pushed to unlock the match, Ding was under pressure and made a mistake. But he was an extraordinary rival.”
The tension, the stress, the physical fatigue from the four hours lived on the edge, in front of the chessboard. Beyond the Singapore verdict, what is most thought-provoking is the explosion of a new lever of champions, who have bypassed the middle generation partly thanks to stamina, training, and mental freshness. Sport, play, art and mathematical science: the comparison with tennis champion Sinner and company is immediate. Not least because Gukesh is the rule, not an exception. Compatriots Erigaisi, projected in the top three, Praggnanandhaa, Nihal Sarin, Sadhwani, and Mendonca have climbed the rankings. The same is true for women: the little Jasmine Paolinis of chess are growing up in the second most populous country on the planet. The similarities do not end there. Master and living encyclopedia Adolivio Capece explains, “Anand has produced a trailing effect, in the same way that Berrettini did with Jannik [Sinner] and the other blue tennis players. Around his successes, an already prolific movement was consolidated. It should be said moreover that Medvedev and Alcaraz himself are two excellent chess players. It is no accident that tennis is called a moving chess game.” Adding to the list the Uzbek Abdusattorov, the French-Iranian Firouzja, the German Keymer, and the American bad boy Hans Niemann-all just over the age of 18-the count adds up. Waiting for Italians Lorenzo Lodici and Luca Moroni, 24 for both.
Going back to the Indians, it is significant that they invented chess–there are more than 600 million practitioners on Earth–in the sixth century AD. The tradition is part of the DNA, amplified by a factor emphasized by Capece: “By them, they constitute a school subject. This is also true today in Italy: it starts in elementary and middle school with checkers, propaedeutic, to get to the 120,000 high school sports students who in class study the moves of pawns, rooks, bishops, horse, woman, and king. The mechanism works even if one problem remains: we need courses aimed at teachers to teach chess.” That is the oldest, most fascinating, complicated, and terrible game that has ever existed.
