When ESPN had a long chat with Dommaraju Gukesh last year, he was on the cusp of breaking into the world's top 10 in the rankings. He'd already earned a host of age-related records to his name, but his targets were relatively modest. "In a few years, I'd like to see myself competing seriously in the World Championship cycle," he'd said. "First of all, I would like to qualify for the Candidates tournament. I believe I have a fair shot and I'll give my best."
It took him less than a year to reach both those goals. By the end of 2023, he'd qualified for the Candidates, held in Toronto in April of this year. He won that tournament and, in ten days' time, will challenge Ding Liren for the world title; at 18, the youngest ever to feature in a World Championship match.
It's hard to overstate the scale of achievement: Even Magnus Carlsen, probably the greatest player of all time, spent almost a decade on the FIDE circuit before he finally contested a World Championship match. Gukesh has had about three years playing at the highest level of the FIDE circuit.
It's a stunning, dramatic rise that has surprised even Viswanathan Anand, who has observed Gukesh's career at close range. "You know, it's not like I particularly had a scenario, but I did not assign a very high probability to him getting there so early," Anand - India's only chess world champion so far - told ESPN earlier this month.
Anand, not surprisingly given his status in Indian chess, is where Gukesh's career effectively started. His first glimpse of top-level chess was in November 2013, when, aged 7, he accompanied his father Rajnikanth to watch the FIDE World Championship match between Anand and Magnus Carlsen. The idea was to give the boy a feel of a sport that he'd just started playing as a hobby.
Eleven years later, the boy has become a man (just about), and is a few weeks of good chess away from being the youngest world champion the sport has ever had.
It's easy to say that Gukesh was always bound for greatness. After all, he was (and still is) India's youngest grandmaster, among many other things: third-youngest grandmaster ever worldwide, third-youngest to reach a chess rating of 2700, youngest to reach a rating of 2750, the 18th-highest-rated player of all time, multiple gold medallist at the Olympiad. However, as with any top athlete, it's been a mix of hard work, meticulous preparation and a lot of drive that's brought him here - and it helped that Gukesh, in his own words, loves the sport. "I love the fact that chess is so complex," he told YouTube channel Take Take Take. "There are things to learn everyday."
He certainly obsessed about it as a child. "That guy had to be dragged out of his system or chess book or board to make him even eat or sleep when he started," Rajnikanth told Take Take Take. In part, it was the culture he found himself in. Chennai is known as India's chess capital but, even that elite atmosphere, Gukesh's school - Velammal Vidyalaya - is a cut above the rest. It's alma mater to 16 of India's chess grandmasters, its most recent alumni including R Praggnanandhaa and R Vaishali - the first brother and sister to earn GM titles.
Here, chess was given priority even beyond academics, which is a rarity in any Indian educational institution. The best chess talents in the school were even given the flexibility to reschedule examinations according to their chess schedules. That freedom allowed Gukesh to become a proper student of the game - and possibly helped him develop the style with which he broke all those age records.
Early Gukesh had an aggressive, ambitious playing style - influenced, says his father Rajnikanth, by Magnus Carlsen. Rajnikanth observed that even though Anand was always an inspiration, once Gukesh started becoming better and better, he began to observe how Carlsen was unlike anyone else to have ever played chess.
Gukesh also had, from early on, a rare and highly-finessed calculating skill that even Carlsen has commented on; Gukesh, he observed, had the ability to calculate lines that he hadn't even thought about. All those skills put together helped him break all those records, dominating the junior circuit with multiple gold medals at the World Youth Championships and Asian Youth Championships.
Carlsen had noted the special talent early on, when the two of them drew a game at the Champions Chess Tour in 2021. He told Take Take Take that he felt that Gukesh had something special in him. But then he made a more significant observation: he felt Gukesh didn't have the strength to sustain his level. The all-attacking style needed something more: It needed solidity.
The very best players have multi-dimensional games that can work in all situations. Carlsen's standard style, for example, is aggressive and ambitious but adding solidity to that made him even harder to beat. In his five world championship matches, for example, Carlsen played 56 classical games and lost just two. He played six rapid tie-break games (split between 2016 against Sergey Karjakin and 2018 against Fabiano Caruana), and lost none of those.
Perhaps Carlsen's comment hit home because that's when Gukesh recognised the need to tweak his game.
GM Srinath Narayanan - the coach of the Indian team that won gold at the Chess Olympiad this year - says he had always known Gukesh as an aggressive player, with that style resulting in a few losses in his formative years. "He was able to also learn from them and grow. I think it's important also to be solid... Gukesh has also developed that ability in the last couple of years," Srinath tells ESPN.
Gukesh's style, Srinath observes, is a sign of changing times in chess, where players are tending to move away from best moves suggested by computers and patterns established in the past.
"By default, if you see the players with the highest score in tournaments, you will generally not find them in the highest in terms of accuracy or percentage of first choice moves of the computer," Srinath says. "You look to find ways off the beaten path and in doing so, of course, your precision percentage comes down, it's not a problem as such. 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 a tournament that really marked him down as one of the top players. However, despite his individual gold, it's a tournament he doesn't look back on very fondly.
Gukesh himself had won his first eight matches on board 1, and his team comprising of Nihal Sarin, B Adhiban, Praggnanandhaa and Raunak Sadhwani were in the lead in the competition. However, the last couple of rounds saw the title slip away from India, as Gukesh got only one point in his last three matches. His gold medal on board 1 was no consolation for missing out on the big trophy.
Soon after that though, he was making massive strides on the FIDE circuit. A month after the Olympiad, his rating hit 2700. A month after that, he had a win over Carlsen.
In 2023, he became the youngest ever player to achieve a rating of 2750, and by the end of the year, by virtue of his performances in the FIDE circuit, qualified for the Candidates.
That Candidates tournament, in Toronto in April, included five players (of a total eight) ranked higher than Gukesh. That statistic alone stacked the odds against him. But he won in style, losing just once in 14 games. In fact, in the business end of the tournament, Gukesh won two of his last three games against Nijat Abasov and Alireza Firouzja, despite the pressure of the tournament scoreboard. When the pressure was the most intense, he brought out his best game.
The icing on the cake came a couple of months later in Budapest when India won the Chess Olympiad - a consolation for the "tragedy", as Gukesh referred to it, of the 2022 edition. Gukesh was at the forefront of India's title run, winning nine points out of ten. He defended his gold medal on board 1, but this time there was also the added smile and the swagger of being the team champions.
The Champions of Chess Olympiad 2024 ������
Edit: Abhyudaya Ram #chess #chessbaseindia #ChessOlympiad pic.twitter.com/R9OhPH1ntR
- ChessBase India (@ChessbaseIndia) September 23, 2024
Gukesh's wins over Fabiano Caruana and Wei Yi and a scarcely believable performance rating of 3056 made it one of the greatest individual tournaments anyone has ever played in the sport.
What this win also did was underline, to the doubters, his status as a worthy contender for the world championship. It was yet another clear indication that he could bring his best to the table at crunch moments, and that he could almost win on demand against some of the best players in the world.
So what is it that makes Gukesh that good?
His peers, speaking to Take Take Take, offered their own views: "He has this go-for-the-kill attitude all the time", says Arjun Erigaisi. "He's a fighter," says Praggnanandha. "He just wants to fight every game."
Vidit Gujrathi was more detailed and insightful. "He has the spark which we see in champions, which you see in Garry Kasparov, Magnus, all the greats. He has that champion mentality. In all his actions, in his thinking, it's visible. He's very mature for his age. He knows how to switch on and switch off. After tournaments, he's a completely different person, more relaxed, completely chill. But during tournaments, it's like game time, he doesn't want to mess around."
His style - attack, ambition and solidity - are of course crucial to his success but Anand and Srinath both point to another facet: his composure.
It's rare to see Gukesh express any emotion on the chess board. On the rare occasion he did, like after a loss to Firouzja in the Candidates tournament, his trademark stoic demeanour gave way to an expression of utter devastation as he held his head in his hands. But his response was swift, as he found a way to come back even stronger and won the tournament.
In fact, Gukesh later identified that defeat as the moment he truly knew he could win the competition. "If I had to pinpoint a moment where I felt this could be mine, it was after I lost to Firouzja, I was obviously upset after that, but during the rest day following the match, I was feeling at my absolute best," Gukesh said.
It's something Anand - who has been closely involved with Gukesh through the Westbridge-Anand Chess Academy (WACA), which supports him - really admires that quality. It was his ability to stay calm, Anand told ESPN, and his strength and composure to take the opportunity when it came that proved to be the difference at the Candidates.
Rajnikanth says his son's biggest strength is his work ethic, but Gukesh played that down by simply saying it was him doing what he loves the most.
His calm and composed nature will be fully tested over the course of the 20 or so days in Singapore. World championships can turn into chaotic affairs, like last year's match between Ding and Ian Nepomniachtchi. Rajnikanth pointed out that despite Ding's not-so-ideal frame of mind even prior to that match, he came out and won it, so there are no illusions in Gukesh's camp on the magnitude of the challenge that awaits them.
However, with that big challenge comes the chance to write his name into the history books. "From the time I was a little kid, I thought it would really cool to be up there [as world champion]. Now I have the opportunity and I am grateful for it," Gukesh said recently.
Only one Indian has ever been world champion. No one has been world champion as a teenager (or at 20, or 21). Ding Liren stands in the way, but come mid-December, the teenager has an opportunity to script history in his sport.