SINGAPORE: Insanely mature.
You don't normally use this phrase to describe the maturity of an 18-year-old but it's a phrase Grzegorz Gajewski uses when talking about his ward, D Gukesh.
He isn't alone.
Paddy Upton has an unwritten rule. Well, kind of. He doesn't normally work with young people because their ability to self-reflect isn't yet on point.
A couple of minutes into his first conversation with the then-17-year-old, Upton made an exception. Because the South African realised the person on the other end of the internet connection didn't have the mind of a 17-year-old.
"His depth and level of self-awareness were remarkable," Upton tells this daily a day after Gukesh became the youngest undisputed world chess champion.
This masthead spoke to both Gajewski and Upton to get an insight into how the teen pulled it off.
When 55...Rf2 was on the board by Ding Liren in game 14 on Thursday, what was the Pole thinking? "It felt like a gift in the most unexpected moment," he says. "I was on my way to dinner and they were supposed to play for one more hour and maybe make a draw."
In an alternate universe, the Indian would not have punished the move. But Upton and Gukesh spent hours on what to do when you are on the doorstep of a win.
"What are the distractions of getting excited and over-attacking? You have half an eye on the result and there's a possibility of taking half an eye from the chessboard. That's when you may make a mistake."
The Indian almost responded to the blunder with a mistake of his own. When he realised what Liren had done, he calmed himself before trading the rooks. Once they were off, it was academic.
If it was academic at the end of game 14, the 18-year-old had a mild existential crisis going into the third rest day. When he had arrived in Singapore, he was quietly sure of walking away with the crown. In those two weeks from game one till game nine, his opponent had slowly pricked and prodded at his young opponent's confidence. A prick here. A prod there. A blow somewhere. After he finished that game with the White pieces, he took Gajewski aside and said something extremely worrying.
'Worried about losing'
"That was when he openly said he was worried about losing," Gajewski, a former second to Viswanathan Anand, says. "For the whole time he thought he would win, he would eventually find a way and then he realised his opponent kept defending, the match was tied and anything could happen. He realised that but to say it openly, to admit it's a problem and feel the pressure and feel that bad things can happen... we discussed it. We made some changes for the rest day. We went to the beach, we tried to make his day as enjoyable as possible because it's extremely exhausting to deal with pressure for not just the two weeks but during the games as well. That helped for sure."
In game 10, he was fully recharged.
Around that time, another thing helped. Gukesh and Upton spoke about the former's sleep hygiene as the Indian was a bit groggy on the board. The South African dipped into his knowledge bank to come up with an idea. "What's the temperature setting in your AC," Upton remembers asking the teen. When he said it was 24*c, Upton asked him to bring it down to 22*c. "When you sleep, you want your body to cool down," the mental conditioning coach tells this daily. "This is a slightly warmer environment and that's probably the optimal sleeping temperature although everyone is slightly different." They also decided to slightly tweak his yoga nidra (in simple terms, 'effortless relaxation').
The morning after he implemented the change, the Indian slept eight hours. Yet another tick. The stars were gradually aligning and it culminated with him taking the lead in the 11th game of the Championship. When his opponent came roaring back with the White pieces, there may have been a danger of his confidence taking a beating.
Yet, when he met Gajewski that night after the 12th game, Gukesh was confident of a win. "He didn't have any problems with losing (that game)," the Pole says. "He felt confident that he would win this match and wasn't afraid of the match going to tie-breaks."
He had expressed that same confidence during a conversation with Upton immediately after that loss in game 12. The man on the other end of the phone line was so taken aback by what he had listened, he had already made his mind up to fly to Singapore to watch his ward become a world champion. "I spoke with him and I had realised he's strong, he's holding, he's got a clear strategy and he's in a good space," Upton says. "I have come to learn that he's a man for the big moments. I had a strong feeling that he's going to win this. That's why I flew over. On the flight here, I imagined I'm probably going to meet him for the first time after the match and I'm probably going to hug him when I look him in the eye and say 'you are the world champion and you deserve it'."
That's exactly what happened.
