Gukesh’s Win Over Carlsen Has the Fandom Spinning

In rapid chess, time is not just a constraint, it is a capricious character. At the Grand Chess Tour Rapid & Blitz in Zagreb, it watched as 19-year-old Gukesh Dommaraju threaded together five straight wins, a kind of surgical storm through a field of monsters, culminating in a shocking dismantling of the world’s strongest rapid player, Magnus Carlsen, with black pieces. As Garry Kasparov put it, this was “a very convincing loss”. Which is not something you say lightly about Magnus Carlsen. For years, Carlsen has been the final boss, the glitchless god-mode player. Players didn’t just prepare for him, they adapted their ambitions around him. To beat him was to touch something mythic. To beat him like this—cleanly, from a losing position, with the black pieces—is to redraw the map.

“It’s nice that I could win two games in a row from losing positions, and against Magnus,” Gukesh said post the win, with hallmark restraint. When Gukesh plays, his face offers almost nothing: no flair, no twitch, no projection of will. Watching him beat Carlsen felt less like watching a teenager dethrone a god than like witnessing some naturally occurring event: a tide coming in, a vine climbing a wall. As ever, Carlsen had preambled the encounter with a bit of dismissive calculus. “Gukesh hasn’t done anything to indicate that he’s going to do well in such a tournament… I will approach it as if I’m playing one of the presumably weaker players.” There’s a special kind of irony here, the kind that history tends to underline in red ink. After the loss, Carlsen conceded: “I was soundly punished by Gukesh for my mistakes.” The game itself was a masterclass in the inverse of spectacle. Gukesh let the board constrict around Carlsen like a slowly receding lung. It didn’t help that Carlsen’s time management was poor throughout.

This kind of win matters because it is not anomalous. Gukesh’s performance in Zagreb wasn’t a single upset, it was a rhythm. His five straight victories included scalps like Ian Nepomniachtchi and Alireza Firouzja, players who had themselves flirted with world championship runs. Each game unfolded with composure. His endgames, in particular, felt less like battles and more like blueprints. His time management showed no signs of panic or fatigue.

To be sure, the aura that used to envelop Carlsen, that quasi-mystical glow of inevitability, is beginning to thin. Post his loss to Gukesh, he said, “Honestly I am not enjoying playing chess at all right now. I don’t feel any flow at all when I’m playing; I’m constantly hesitating and it’s just really poor right now,”, before acknowledging the harsh truth: “All credit to Gukesh… He’s playing incredibly well and he’s taking his chances too.”

The golden generation of chess does not carry the psychological baggage of those who came before. They grew up not just revering Carlsen but studying him like a codebase that could eventually be rewritten. And Gukesh, among the cohort of prodigies from India, is perhaps the least dramatic and the most terrifying. Not because he forces results but because he resists panic. He is the eye of the storm that never spins. If chess had a category for minimalist brutality, he would be its laureate.

Carlsen, in the post-mortem of another recent defeat, offered a window into the quiet wreckage of dominance: “I wanted a score that reflects the fact I think I’m still significantly better … and since I couldn’t achieve that, a potential win of the tournament would not mean as much.” It was an unusually vulnerable sentence, and possibly the clearest indication that, for Carlsen, winning has never been just about the scoreboard, it has been about the narrative. And now, that narrative is slipping out of his hands. The thing is, form is always a moving target, and the deeper truth is simpler: the field is catching up.

Indian chess has long had its revolutions. Anand was the first wave. The current teenage surge—Praggnanda, Arjun, Gukesh—is something else entirely: it is no longer about arrival, but replacement. These players are not aiming for respect; they are aiming for reign.

And yet, there is something almost old-fashioned about Gukesh. He seems uninterested in being a symbol. He rarely courts the camera. He is, in some ineffable way, already a player from a different age: modern in method, antique in temperament. His win over Carlsen, then, is not just a chapter; it may be an inflection point. It signals that Magnus’ dominance, while not ended, is now porous. The players he once dismissed now punish his lapses. The style that once overwhelmed is now being countered by a new, patient precision.

Jumping into the r/chess thread after Gukesh’s five-game streak, the mood is electric. Comments are spiking with playful jabs at the “weaker player” baseline and cheeky memes about table slams and revenge arcs, all celebrating that moment when Gukesh cooked Carlsen on 6.BLd. It’s a digital confetti storm where every upvote is a high-five for the next-gen hero, all hailing the newest plot twist in the chess universe.

The Grand Chess Tour in Zagreb features a hybrid format: 9 rounds of rapid chess (25+10) with wins worth 2 points, followed by 18 blitz games (5+2) in a double round-robin with standard 1-point wins. Gukesh currently holds sole lead in the SuperUnited Rapid & Blitz Croatia tournament with 10 points after six rounds—two points clear of Jan‑Krzysztof Duda—while Magnus Carlsen, on 6 points, sits in 4th place. After today’s final rapid rounds, focus shifts to two full days of blitz, and the overall winner will be determined by the combined rapid + blitz score. While blitz is not Gukesh’s strength, he is now a strong contender to win the tournament, an outcome that would mark his first Grand Chess Tour title, and maybe the last time the old order sleeps easy.

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