The Kingdom of Gukesh

A HERO’S WELCOME IN INDIA, PARTICULARLY when the hero is both young and modest, is a ritual of belonging, with traditions—garlands, flowers, turbans, shawls—heaped alongside the modern cultural apparatus of adulation: hashtags, reels, memes, retweeted clips. This is how India loves its champions. We don’t sip our pride; we drown in it. In living rooms and coaching acad­emies, Dommaraju Gukesh’s victory settles into place like a parable. Fathers lean back into their chairs and point to the screen, saying, “See, this is what hard work can do.” Mothers wonder aloud if their children should be picking up chess. A thousand teenagers, meanwhile, look at Gukesh and think two things simultaneously: “That could be me” and “I could never do that”.

The victory is also deeply strange, unrelatable even. Chess, in its pur­est sense, is absurdly niche. You know this already if you have ever seen a high-level game: two people sitting motionless for hours, their faces blank but tense. To the trained, every decision vibrates with meaning, but to most of us, chess is inscrutable. So, when a champion reveals his human side, it is all the more precious. In his three-hour-long post-championship interview with chess commentator Sagar Shah, the 18-year-old who has brought the World Championship trophy back to India gives a fascinat­ing peek into his mindset by admitting that he, too, felt his emotions swell at critical points of the 14-game match. There were moments, says Gukesh, when he was so excited that he felt his thoughts slipping away. His hand shook, his mind was operating at less than 100 per cent, and he even forgot lines he had rehearsed with his team. “It was very scary,” he says. As he admits this human frailty, he also speaks of learning from it. He says, almost casually, that being World Champion is not enough: “There is so much to improve.” Consider the absurdity of a boy who has just done the hardest thing chess has to offer, who has toppled a reigning champion not just by out-prepping but by outthinking, outlasting, and outmanoeuvring him, and who still says, with a straight face and zero guile, that he is not satisfied.

“It’s great to witness history being made. I have gotten to know Gukesh quite well in the past four years and he has had a remarkable journey,” says Viswanathan Anand, talking to Open. A five-time world champion, who for decades stood alone as India’s chess emissary to the world, Anand carved a path so wide that entire generations have followed him. In fact, even at the World Championship, running into his mentor in the elevator after a bad first game proved therapeutic to Gukesh. The newly minted champion has since revealed that Anand told him while he had only 11 games to make up for his losses in his World Championship match against Veselin Topalov, Gukesh had 13. “These things happen and you don’t know how to cope with it,” Anand tells Open. “Ding had a difficult couple of years and he was carrying the past into this match. He was con­stantly a bit more wary than he should have been. Gukesh had come up with a strategy of making Ding play as much as possible. He had a higher tolerance for risk.” Anand also believes that Gukesh “felt subconsciously” that he “wouldn’t win on chess alone”. “He knew he would have to put psychological pressure as well,” Anand says.

It is tempting to see Gukesh’s victory as an example of stellar prepa­ration, of a prodigy working harder, studying deeper than the reigning champion. But that doesn’t quite capture it. At the heart of his success lies a deeply psychological narrative: that he wanted Ding Liren to feel, at all times, that he was the one pushing, and Ding the one reacting. The idea here isn’t just about physical moves on the board but a quiet imposition of will, a shift in psychological balance where one player commands the tempo while the other can do little more than respond. For Ding, a famously introspective and sometimes fragile player under pressure, the impact of this was immense. It is one thing to face an opponent across the board; it is another entirely to sense, deeply and repeatedly, that you are never quite in control. It was a strategy that required precision, restraint, and above all, confidence.

Gukesh’s success feels oddly democratic. He is the son of a doctor, the pro­tégé of coaches who built him not as an exception but as an outcome of disci­plined planning. “The best way to promote chess is to have a world champion and a relatable hero for young people,” says Gukesh’s former coach and friend Vishnu Prasanna, in a conversation with Open. “This is the most pressure he has felt and he still managed to keep his wits about him.” Watching from Chennai, Prasanna felt his throat constrict when Gukesh refused to settle for a draw in game 6. It turns out Gukesh did not know his position was worse than that of his opponent—this was revealed in the press conference where both players candidly discussed their strategies and moves, holding nothing back, in a departure from past champions who liked to be shrouded in mys­tery. On a late-night phone call with Gukesh, when Prasanna sensed that he was beginning to doubt himself, he reminded the young man that he simply had to make the best moves and that victory would come in the least expected way. Gukesh has admitted that it helped to hear that simple truth. And victory did come as a happy surprise—in the final game, when everyone thought the match was headed into tiebreaks, Ding made a slip, perhaps from the accumulated psychological exhaustion, sealing Gukesh’s victory. “Now he is in the role of being chased rather than the one chasing,” says Prasanna. “It’s an incredible feeling. No one expected him to ascend the throne so rapidly. The games where he refused to draw were for me crucial moments of the match, and they speak of his determination and character.”

Gukesh’s refusal to settle for draws that the engines were recommending as the “logical” outcomes were a declaration that he was will­ing to shoulder responsibility for the game. To play a computer-approved move is, in a sense, to cede agency, to hide behind the shield of cor­rectness. But Gukesh chose to rely on his own understanding, trusting the process he and his team had honed during months of prepa­ration. He played human chess, rich in ideas, intent, and uncertainty—risking critique from the omniscient eye of commentators wielding Stockfish evaluations like hammers. This quiet defiance marks Gukesh as not only a champi­on but an artist. He played for truth as he under­stood it. Even when he did not fully understand his position or stumbled into unfamiliar terri­tory after playing an arcane opening, Gukesh was improvising, probing, willing himself to see clarity where there was none. He saw it as an opportunity to engage in the kind of pure chess that has become increasingly rare. His win, in the end, is a testament to his courage— to face bewildering positions in chess and to navigate the chaos of life itself.

“Throughout the match, Gukesh was driving Ding’s thought process,” says Pentala Harikrishna, the Indian grandmas­ter who was one of Gukesh’s seconds for the match. For a period of three weeks, Harikrishna was holed up in a villa in Malaga, Spain, along with Radoslaw Wojtaszek, the Polish player who had served as a second for Anand, and the young German grandmaster Vincent Keymer, Gukesh’s good friend—and rival. “We had to pick a place with internet and other facilities and Malaga was one of those towns we had all passed by on our way to Gibraltar for tournaments,” says Harikrishna, speaking to Open from Prague, where he lives. “Gajew­ski [a former Anand second who led Gukesh’s team], Wojtaszek and I are of similar age and where we brought in our experience, Keymer came up with crazily inventive ideas. Both Jan Klimkowsky [who had worked with Gukesh ahead of the Candidates Tournament] and Keymer had a great energy about them.” Working in near-secrecy, in a remote Spanish town, the team pulled off a heist that few imagined possible.

In chess, as in life, victories are often painted as solitary triumphs. The cham­pion lifts the trophy, alone, as the crowd roars. But the truth is more layered, more beautiful. When Gukesh sat at the board in Singapore, there was an un­seen strength behind him. The moves he played—the flat-out surprises, the ones that baffled the engines, the ones that pushed Ding into passive defence— were born of months of collective effort. “The crown has returned after 11 years. It’s a great time for Indian chess,” says Harikrishna. “Asian players have been underestimated and underexposed in the past but this is no longer true. India won the Olympiad and now the World Championship. We may soon have 10 Indian players rated 2700.” Where once the epicentre of chess lay firmly in Europe and the Soviet Union, today it is dispersing. India, China, and a host of emerging chess powers are reshaping the map. Gukesh is both a product and a herald of this shift, his victory signalling a broader transformation.

Tamil Nadu alone has produced two world champions and over 30 grandmas­ters. Prasanna’s academy in Thiruthangal, near Sivakasi, backed by the Hatsun Group, is a revolutionary initiative to broadbase chess across the state that is al­ready producing promising young talents. New academies are sprouting, chess YouTubers are thriving and there is, for the first time, Tamil content on chess in the form of live commentary, analysis and even poetry. Venkatesh Ezhumalai, a 30-year-old Tamil chess YouTuber with 80,000 subscribers, says he is glad he made the difficult choice of quitting his sales job in the pharma sector to focus on making chess content and launching a new academy in Chennai. “It has barely been a year since I started the academy and I already have 60 students.” Enquiries have shot up since Gukesh became world champion. “Some 25-30 people have expressed interest and a handful have visited. Let’s see if this momentum continues.”

“Chess and Tamil Nadu are a cultural fit,” says Viswanathan Anand. “Tamil families put their kids in chess class, they make sure they go to summer camps. And that is a huge, huge thing that we benefit from.” His own journey had begun at the Tal Chess Club, started in 1972 in Madras by chess player Manuel Aaron— India’s first International Master who also started the magazine Chessmate—and backed by Soviet funds. “I like to think we are in the process of mainstreaming chess—by that I mean that even people who don’t play the game or follow the game are still interested in knowing what happens with it. We have got some nice developments like comedians joining, and now commentary in Indian languages. And each time the chess audience grows a little bit,” says Anand.

In the days following Gukesh’s victory, the number of Indians playing virtu­ally on Chess.com overtook the number of Americans for the first time ever. “Over the past three days, we have hosted 17 million games daily—the highest in the last year—with 15 more games starting per second during peak hours. The Gukesh wave has arrived,” Chess.com tweeted on December 17. Gukesh’s victory then is not just a win. It is a contagion, spreading invisibly through the cracks and crevices of a nation’s consciousness, pulling people toward those 64 squares as if by some ancient gravitational force. There is something about this—something beyond titles and rankings—that feels almost mythic. For India, the origins of chess are tangled in chaturanga, the precursor to the game that bloomed in the subcontinent centuries ago. And yet, for much of modern history, chess felt like a relic of the elite, an artefact to admire but not to engage with. For Indians, Gukesh’s win is an invitation, a reminder that chess belongs to everyone, that its language is universal. Gukesh won on a stage most of us will never see, and yet, his win is felt by the millions playing games in their quiet corners of India. These games, too, are victories, even when they are not.

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