SINGAPORE: Squeezing water out of stone.
That's one of D Gukesh's signature moves. He loves to suffer but he ensures the opponent suffers with him.
On Thursday, he wanted to suffer. He came in wanting a fistfight and a long match. He came to grind for six hours even in an equal position. The commentary panel streaming the final had already switched the topic of discussion to Friday's tie-breaks. Then, Ding Liren made one of the worst blunders in the more than 100-year history of the World Championship.
Gukesh made wine out of stone to become the 18th and youngest undisputed world champion to spark scenes of pandemonium in the viewing gallery, the fan zone and inside the media centre.
A FIDE social media official tripped and fell down but still maintained professional etiquette asking a colleague 'to be ready with the post', journalists were running all over the place and strangers with an Indian persuasion were congratulating and hugging each other. They had witnessed history and wanted to share their joy with people they had never met before and would likely never meet again.
Five minutes before the carnage inside the lobby of the venue, there was calm and serenity. Fans wanted to know the procedure to buy tickets for Friday. People were chilling inside the fan zone playing pick-up chess games. And Dr Rajinikanth, Gukesh's dad, was pacing up and down, next to the media centre, as he had done all match, not knowing his son was about to be coronated.
The 18-year-old was up three pawns to two in a rook-bishop endgame and he was asking questions. But the questions weren't menacing enough; mainly because Grandmasters have no problems defending this position.
After Gukesh's 54 Ke5, the evaluation bar gave the Indian an advantage of -0.15. Or, in other words, nothing (till it goes beyond +0.5 or -0.5, it's a game of cat and mouse and hoping your opponent doesn't find the optimal moves for a long period).
Here, Liren didn't even have to find the best move (55 Ra4, for those asking). All he had to do was play any of the five top moves and still be more or less equal. He made one of the worst moves possible (55 Rb2) with, perhaps, the intention of trading rooks. But when your opponent is a pawn up in the endgame and your bishop is trapped, it's like signing your death sentence.
As soon as the 2023 world champion made that move, the evaluation bars across all engines jumped to life in favour of Black. Actually, it took Gukesh a few seconds to realise what had happened. He was about to blitz 55 Rb3 before he had his eureka moment.
So, he first calmed himself. He reached out to his water bottle to ensure he wasn't actually imagining things on the board. "I didn't realise (that Liren had played Rb2)," he said in the post-match press conference. "I was going to play Rb3 almost. Then I saw that his bishop is getting trapped and if he has Ke1, I have Ke5 and the pawn ending which is totally winning. When I realised it, it was probably the best moment of my life."
Once he traded the rooks, the next few moments were proper cinema inside the fish tank. Liren had already realised his blunder and couldn't bear to look at the board. Gukesh, who knew he was about to achieve a childhood dream, couldn't sit still. So, he started walking all around the playing hall, like a kid next to a candy store.
It was one of the defining frames of the last three weeks. Liren, physically and metaphorically, with his head resting on the table, wondering what he had become. Gukesh walked up and down while trying to suppress a smile. He was also wondering what he had become.
Once Liren knew the game was up, a cursory handshake followed. The wunderkind, not prone to many emotions, wept in his chair before raising both his hands in victory to announce the birth of a new king.
Truth be said, this is why the Indian had refused draws in previous games. This is why the 18-year-old kept playing when the easier option would have been to head back to his room after playing threefold repetitions. In two of the previous 13 games, he had rejected the idea after the world champion had proposed it over the board. "I just like playing chess," he had said after rejecting the idea the first time.
But this was, in the bigger scheme of things, all about strategy. "My whole strategy was to push as much as possible in every single game with both colours," he would say later on Thursday. "And it wasn't working till the last moment, but it just takes one game for the strategy to pay off." Ever since he burst into the limelight as a 16-year-old who won Olympiad gold on Board 1 in 2022, it's been his thing. Make the opponent suffer. Play one extra move. Keep him guessing. Reject draws. Find something. Anything.
In chess parlance, it's trying to squeeze water out of stone.