King’s Movers

FROM THE VERY first move, it was a clash of two opposing ideologies across the board. Eighteen-year-old Dommaraju Gukesh, the youngest ever World Chess Championship challenger, sought to seize control from the outset, while the reigning champion, Ding Liren, weathered the attack like a calm and impenetrable fortress. It was a contest of fire against stone, and in the end, it was stone that endured. Gukesh came prepared with a provocative and hypermodern opening and to his credit, managed to throw Ding into unfamiliar territory, forcing him into a long think and gaining a half hour on the clock. The challenger’s pawns marked an advance, like flags planted in enemy soil, yet even in chaos Ding played the accurate move every single time, unlike the younger player who seemed to be following a predetermined strategy. Ding delayed castling, keeping his king uncommitted and not creating any cracks that Gukesh’s pieces so desperately sought to exploit. As the middlegame unfolded, Gukesh began to falter. The space he had gained in the opening became a burden. His pieces, stretched across the board, lost their cohesion. Ding seized this moment like a general waiting for the enemy to overextend, and activated his rooks, placing them on central files where their presence became suffocating. For Gukesh, the game was a harsh lesson in control: the importance of not just gaining space but using it effectively, of ensuring that aggression does not stretch into recklessness. This game was in fact eerily reminiscent of Gukesh’s last classical game against Ding early this year at the Tata Steel Masters where, playing white, he had adopted a similar attack, advancing his pawns energetically and seeking to disrupt Ding’s solid setup. Similarly, in the first World Championship game, Gukesh introduced novelties (such as g4 in the 10th move) aiming to unsettle Ding’s position. However, in both instances, Ding’s defensive prowess and strategic depth allowed him to neutralise Gukesh’s offensive.

The board is neither ally nor adversary; it is only a mirror, reflecting the soul of the player. For Gukesh, it reflects a force still finding its shape, still learning when to strike and when to withdraw. Each champion marks an era not merely by their victories but by the manner of their play, the psychological footprint they leave. Magnus Carlsen brought an unsettling precision, a hunter’s patience that stalked opponents until they suffocated under the weight of the endgame. Ding Liren, by contrast, works like a poet of closed positions, turning small edges into stories that spiral inward. If Gukesh does win the 14-game-long battle against Ding and ascends the throne, he will bring something raw and urgent—a style that bends rules without breaking them, a fire that refuses to settle into quiet embers. Gukesh does not suffocate like Carlsen or balance like Ding. He storms the board. He embodies a new world where patience is a luxury, where time is as much a resource as material. His games, especially his rise through the 2022 Olympiad, the 2023 World Cup and the 2024 Candidates Tournament, reflect a kinetic energy that dares opponents to fight or fold.

At the time of going to press, Gukesh had made a dramatic comeback in the third game, levelling the match score at 1.5-1.5 after the second ended in a draw. Going in with guns blazing, Gukesh continued to blitz out moves he had prepared even as time drained from Ding’s side, not in minutes but in heartbeats, each tick a reminder of his shrinking grasp. As the game passed the middlegame’s turning point, the atmosphere around Ding seemed to change. His calm demeanour cracked at the edges, his usually serene face marked by flickers of calculation and doubt. The seconds bled away, and Ding’s precision—normally his greatest ally—began to falter. The position demanded answers, sharp and immediate, but Ding’s natural inclination to find perfection betrayed him. By the 37th move, his time had nearly evaporated. It was not defeat by strategy but by tempo, the cruelest kind for a mind as brilliant as his. And a kind of poetic justice for Gukesh, who was once criticised for his excessive calculation on the board and his deliberate slowness.

Gukesh’s career had begun with a blaze. At 12, he became a grandmaster, narrowly missing Sergey Karjakin’s record. “I don’t care about all that, I don’t even care about my ranking and other milestones. I just want to play better chess and win all the big tournaments,” Gukesh had told me when I interviewed him at his Chennai residence in September 2022. “The goal is to become world champion,” he had said matter-of-factly, even though it felt more like a press statement at the time. The 2022 Chess Olympiad was Gukesh’s coming-out party. Leading India’s B team, he delivered a string of brilliant performances, including a victory over Alexei Shirov that showcased his fearless attacking style. His rise since then has been as sharp as his gameplay—a fact that has astounded even his mentor, former champion Viswanathan Anand. By the age of 18, Gukesh had already eclipsed 2750 on the Elo scale, a number that speaks not merely of talent but of consistency under fire. The youngest player to enter the top 20 rankings, he had a pivotal role in India’s historic gold medal win at the 2024 Budapest Olympiad. And through it all, he has been playing extremely beautiful games—the one against Chinese Grandmaster Wei Yi at the 2024 Olympiad, for instance, where Gukesh sidestepped the main lines and led the game into less explored territories.

Both players fought in a dense thicket of possibilities, their moves sparking against each other in a battle neither could control. But in the end, Gukesh’s calculations were sharper. The game stretched to 80 moves, a test of endurance as much as skill, and Gukesh finished on top after some very precise endgame play.

“Gukesh has the most variance from engines among all the top players,” says Sagar Shah, founder of Chessbase India, a leading chess news website. “Even back in 2019, at a camp with Kramnik, he told me that time was the only thing that could stop him from finding the best move in any situation.” A chess player himself, Shah decided to shift focus from playing to reporting in 2017, a time when the triumvirate of Gukesh, Arjun Erigaisi and Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa was coming up. “Praggnanandhaa was already a star and Arjun and Gukesh were just entering the scene. They each have an insane focus on improving without caring much for numbers and milestones. I see this in Arjun even now—he doesn’t really care that he has crossed 2800 in Elo ratings,” Shah says.

Having never trained on engines before the pandemic—a crazy thing to do in today’s world—Gukesh plays a very human brand of chess, unbalancing the board, embracing positions where both players teeter on the edge, and leaping with the confidence that his calculation will see him through. His tactics reveal an instinct for improvisation, a flair for finding resources where others see chaos. There is a romance to Gukesh’s style, a willingness to risk it all. Of late he has greatly improved his time management and his opening preparation by working with coaches like Grzegorz Gajewski, who was once Anand’s second. In fact, Gukesh, who has been dissed for supposedly not being intuitive player, has managed to beat Magnus Carlsen in both blitz and rapid formats. “He is someone who always returns from the worst slump to dazzle the world. After the Grand Swiss 2023, he was very stressed out and had fallen behind in rankings. We thought he would give up reaching the Candidates Tournament. But the Chennai Grandmasters happened and he had to win—it was in his home city after all,” says Sagar, on a phone call from Singapore, where the WCC is underway.

At the World Championship, he is certainly playing to his strengths, attacking while playing white and mounting a stiff defence in the second game which ended in a draw. Gukesh’s style is built on initiative, not as a strategy but as an identity. “Initiative is a cornerstone of his play. He goes in for the kill and has an almost complete disregard for material. Sacrifices come naturally to him,” says V Saravanan, a Chennai-based chess coach and commentator. “He plays the opponent, not the board. For instance, in his game against Andrei Volokitin at the London Classic 2023, he gave up a lot of material and had fun at the expense of his opponent because he wanted to complicate the game and win. These are the things that make a world champion,” says Saravanan.

If Gukesh is fire, Arjun is ice and Praggnanandhaa is like water—flowing, adaptive and impossible to pin down. Together they are redefining the rhythm of professional chess, breaking old paradigms and marking a shift towards India’s dominance in the game. Nineteen-year-old Praggnanandhaa’s games thrive in the middlegame, where most falter. Here, his precision becomes a weapon, his tactical imagination a labyrinth. Consider his victory against Carlsen during the 2022 Meltwater Champions Chess Tour Chessable Masters.

Praggnanandhaa, playing black, faced a complicated line in Carlsen’s Ruy Lopez opening, but maintained his poise and neutralised all attempts to create imbalances, and when the world champion faltered at move 40, leaving his knight en prise, Praggnanandhaa closed in. Carlsen fell to the prodigy for the second time in three months (the first was at the Airthings Masters 2022). He beat Carlsen, who is the world no 1, in classical chess for the first time earlier this year—at the Norway Chess 2024 tournament where he finished third and also beat world no 2 Fabiano Caruana. While Gukesh and Arjun accelerate chess with their aggression, Praggnanandhaa slows it, forcing opponents to play his game. His games illustrate his dedication to playing “good chess”—a purity of purpose that seeks sound moves over flashy combinations. It is not the sort of play that draws immediate acclaim, but it is a style that, over time, wears down even the most unyielding opponents.

“I think I play very instinctively and take a lot of risks, more than most people playing at this level,” says Arjun Erigaisi, in a telephonic interview to Open from Warangal. From being a positional player, he has transitioned to a dynamic style, disarming lower-rated players consistently to climb up the ratings even when he did not have many invites to play closed tournaments that Praggnanandhaa and Gukesh were already playing. Erigaisi is a pragmatist, and he is constantly analysing his own games to figure out what works for him and what does not. “The risks I have taken have paid more dividends than they have resulted in unexpected losses, so I continue to take this approach,” he says. When he sees a problem, he actively fixes it and turns it into his strength. “I really wanted to qualify for the Candidates and missing it narrowly was a big blow. I then started working on decoupling from the result. I took up yoga and meditation and I think it has worked. This year, I lost four big games but in none of these cases did my following game get affected by the loss,” he says.

Arjun’s rise began in earnest with his dominant performance at the 2022 Tata Steel India Rapid and Blitz, where he outclassed seasoned veterans and rising stars alike. In chess, the opening is a map, charting the course of the game’s terrain. For many players, it becomes a lifeline—a series of rehearsed patterns offering safety amid chaos. But for Arjun, the opening is an invitation to explore. His repertoire, vast and eclectic, refuses to settle into predictable pathways and includes lines that seem out of place in modern chess, as though resurrected from forgotten texts. And yet, what is most striking about Arjun is not merely his skill but his composure. He is a player untouched by the bright lights, his focus as unbroken as if he were in a quiet room, alone with the board. His victories are free of fanfare; he is not one to revel or to linger in the glory of the moment.

EXPERTS HAVE COMPARED Gukesh’s arc to a young Bobby Fischer’s—a champion whose play was not merely technical mastery but a spectacle of ambition, raw confidence, and a daring that bordered on the reckless. Fischer, too, was a figure who played for the throat, yet with a profound understanding that melded aggression with precision, a quality that Gukesh seems to channel on the board. Much like Fischer in the 1960s, Gukesh showed a relentless spirit, an unwillingness to settle for draws, and a remarkable resilience under pressure. The making of a world champion is no mere accumulation of victories; it’s a saga where character is tested and hardened. Fischer famously learned Russian to penetrate the minds of his Soviet opponents, to drink deeply from the wellspring of chess literature. In today’s digital age, Gukesh and his generation digest millions of lines from engines like Stockfish, yet Gukesh’s play reveals a core instinct for human strategy, a readiness to gamble and blaze his own path. Fischer reshaped the world of chess by confronting and ultimately dethroning the Soviet dominance of the game, and though Gukesh is still on the ascent, he is already staking his claim in a world where the fight for supremacy grows fiercer with each generation.

In the astonishing surge of the golden generation from India, we may be watching the dawn of a new era—one in which Indian players redefine dominance. The emergence of Viswanathan Anand set the stage for this generation, as he carried Indian chess from obscurity into international reverence. Anand’s games in the early 2000s displayed an unparalleled blend of tactical genius and positional awareness. Today, it is Indian players who carry forward the ambition that once defined the Russian greats, but with a twist: they are explorers in an uncharted wilderness, each player blazing a unique path that yet leads toward the same mountaintop.

Vidit Gujrathi, who rose to prominence in the years before this younger wave, has been another key figure who has contributed to the ethos of this golden generation. His steady, methodical play, his grounding in positional chess, and his maturity on and off the board have served as both example and encouragement for younger players. Vidit is the bridge between the reign of Anand and this new era, standing as a model of consistent, principled play. Then there is Nihal Sarin, who defies categorisation in many ways. His style is one of inscrutable calm, even when confronted with chaos on the board. Nihal seems to thrive in positions where calculation appears endless, yet his moves reveal an uncanny instinct for simplification amid complexity.

When they play, each victory, each defining game, ripples through the ecosystem, challenging and inspiring the next player, each a part of a continuous cycle of ambition and reinvention.

“Engines, easier access to sponsorships and cheap air travel to Europe are the reasons this generation has risen faster than any other in the history of chess,” says Saravanan, who rues that an entire generation, comprising players like Abhiban Baskaran, Koneru Humpy, SP Sethuraman and Harika Dronavalli, lost out on opportunities because there are no good circuit tournaments in India. “Gukesh, Praggnanandhaa and Arjun took advantage of the pandemic to play the top players in the world and get better. There are also more tournaments now that are open to them.”

Thanks to their meteoric rise, these young players have not only inspired one another but also the nation’s interest in chess. The once-solitary pursuit has become a spectacle, and the players now bear a dual responsibility: to push their own limits and to represent a movement that has implications far beyond their individual successes.After all, there is always an Abhimanyu Mishra or a Divith Reddy Adulla, the new World Under-8 Champion, watching.

Arjun ErigaisiChess championshipGukesh DommarajuR Praggnanandhaasport