STAVANGER: At one point of time on the Norway Chess broadcast on Sunday, commentators Tania Sachdev, David Howell and Jovanka Houska were talking about the distinct possibility of D Gukesh being at the bottom of the six-man tournament after the sixth round.
The Indian world champion, under all kinds of pressure from Magnus Carlsen, was just about hanging, surviving. His only aim was not to lose instantly. That was 8.30 PM local time on Sunday.
24 hours later, at 8.30 PM on Monday, it was deja vu all over again. Gukesh was again under all sorts of pressure from Arjun Erigaisi.
But — and this is what the 19-year-old has essentially done throughout his fledgling but already elite chess career — he found a way to convert both of those games from almost loss positions to big, narrative-shattering wins.
When Gukesh and his team — comprising coach Grzegorz Gajewski and father, Dr. Rajinikanth — left for Norway Chess on May 23, this was one of their aims. To beat Carlsen and Erigaisi. The world champion had played both of them at least five times each in Classical chess but he had yet to taste a win.
He has now got that monkey off his back in the most satisfying way possible — and against the odds, comeback from the brink. In both those games, Carlsen and Erigaisi committed miscalculations and game-changing blunders in the endgame which allowed their opponent to embrace the light at the end of a long tunnel.
But flip that argument on its head. The only reason why both of them even got into that stage of having to make extra moves with the clock ticking down is because of Gukesh's innate ability and love of suffering as long as the opponent suffers with him. This is one of the things the Indian World No 5 has seemingly borrowed from Novak Djokovic, another elite athlete who loves suffering as long as the person on the other side suffers.
During both games, the evaluation bar massively favoured Carlsen and Erigaisi at one point. Both those games turned because the Indian did two things. He married calculation with precision with a dollop of intuitiveness. His opponents scrambled under time pressure. In a sense, you could say Gukesh — not really known to excel in the quicker formats as well as at playing intuitive chess — beat Carlsen and Erigaisi at their own games.
Both Gajewski and Carlsen addressed this aspect of Gukesh over the last 48 hours. "When you are in trouble and you keep fighting and you get rewarded for it, you have even more faith that it makes sense to keep fighting. So the very next day, when you're again in trouble, you definitely know what to do, you just keep fighting," Gajewski said of his ward's win on Monday.
Mental resolve. Ability to fight. Keep pushing. However you dress it up, it's one of Gukesh's big party tricks. It's what made Carlsen famous more than a decade ago, his capacity to keep pushing, keep fighting and keep the person on the other end of the table glued to the chair for as long as possible. It's what the Super GM displayed on Sunday in a position which didn't favour the white pieces for the first three hours and change. "I remember being that age myself and sometimes your energy, your fighting qualities and your optimism are bigger than the quality of your moves," Carlsen reflected on Monday. "For a long time, Gukesh was just blindly pushing."
That has enabled the world champion to rescue a tournament that had threatened to snowball into a crisis of confidence two days into the tournament when he was pointless. Now, he's joint second and has all the momentum in the world.
Will he capitalise?