SINGAPORE: This kid, eh? He doesn't know when he's beaten. He doesn't say no to a completely new challenge. And he very politely takes down a world champion.
On Sunday, D Gukesh took a giant step towards becoming the youngest World chess champion in history after beating Ding Liren with White pieces. With his second win, the match is now 6-5 in the Indian's favour with three games to go. If he can avoid defeat in the remaining games, he will become only the second from India to hold the biggest crown in all of chess .
That paragraph, however, barely scratches the surface of what transpired on a manic Sunday. It had more twists and turns than the many rides and attractions at Universal Studios, one of the neighbouring landmarks in Sentosa.
If Saturday's game was a snoozefest, this caught fire as soon as Gukesh revealed his hands by playing an Opening he had never before played in his relatively short competitive career (Reti, Reversed Blumenfeld Gambit). Because this game hadn't been part of the Indian's repertoire, Liren was off prep after a couple of moves.
His position was already complicated after he made the committal 3 c5 rather than the more unsexy but solid e3. When Gukesh blitzed out his response, the 32-year-old was already unhappy. He didn't like where this was going so he settled in for a very deep thinking state. By the time he made his next two moves, his opponent had achieved his opening goal.
Gukesh's first five moves had taken less than 40 seconds. For Liren? More than an hour. He had also derived a small advantage so he had something concrete to work on.
But the margins at this level are so minute, so microscopic, it can all turn. One moment, Gukesh was celebrating. One misjudgment later (9...d3 rather than c5), his pieces were on quicksand, all struggling for oxygen. That momentum shift was visible in the viewing hall as the teen became cross with himself. Liren, who had appeared extremely fidgety during his thinking state, knew he was off the hook.
For one hour, Gukesh brooded over the chessboard. It was his turn to move but the enormity of the situation had him like a hurricane. So he sat there in his gaming chair, to allow himself a moment — or an hour — to calm himself. He realised he had goofed up and had not only lost his advantage but was also in real danger of losing the game. By the time he found a holding move - 11 g3 - all, it seemed, was genuinely lost (in the post-game press conference, he kept calling his contributions in this phase 'stupid').
Soon after spending an hour, he wanted to compose himself further. So, off he went inside the players' lounge. Liren had already blitzed a response but Gukesh wanted a few moments away from the watching world. He told himself to keep fighting. His only goal, going forward, was to keep surviving.
In the commentary for chess24, both Anish Giri and Peter Leko gave a sense of the task. "Not sure it's humanly impossible to find all the moves even though the computer doesn't mind Gukesh's position (-0.2)," they said. It was because his opponent controlled the important squares and the Knight was on its way to occupy the crucial c5 square.
An active game of cat and mouse began on the board with the Chennai boy happy to cling on to anything vaguely resembling comfort. That's when he found 16 a4. In hindsight, this was the move which changed everything.
It gave him room to breathe, a way out of this mess and, potentially, a way to ask some basic questions. The next few moves allowed him to mobilise his bishop, continue the b pawn's progress and put some pressure on Liren's Queen. He also managed a way to remove the all powerful c5 Knight. All these precise moves also put pressure on Liren to spend some time.
With both players racing against the clock to meet the first time control (an average of less than 90 seconds per move), who would blink first? Liren blinked with 21 Rd7.
The imbalance was too much and Liren blundered twice in a matter of minutes as the engine went from +0.7 to 4+. A curt handshake followed. The final rites followed after the fatalistic 28 Qc8 as he was now dropping a piece. As soon as Liren played it on the board, Gukesh took the hanging Knight with his Queen to administer the kiss of death to his opponent.
As soon as Liren resigned, chants of Gukesh emanated from the lobby of the playing venue (lots of Indians had congregated inside the fanzone from as early as 4.00 PM thanks to it being a Sunday). A few hours later, this normally quiet five-star hotel witnessed surreal scenes as people started screaming 'Bharat mata ki jai' before serenading the teen and his father.