Dommaraju Gukesh perhaps saw his dream lie in tatters. He was kicking himself, he would go on to say, for blowing what was shaping up to be a golden opportunity to finally make a decisive punch after all the sparring that led to seven consecutive draws before this. For an 18-year-old, the magnitude of it all might have been overwhelming, to the point of suffocation. Not Gukesh, though.
Game 11 was always going to be pivotal. It perhaps represented Gukesh’s biggest opportunity to adopt a bold gameplan and look for that potentially decisive victory. His team recognized it too, and made him play a really sharp line that, of course, came with its risks, but one in which they saw tangible rewards too. Those rewards were sitting in front of them very, very soon, as Ding Liren used up more than an hour of his time for just the opening five moves.
A real sharp position where he could be ambitious, more than an hour’s advantage on the clock, it was all going just as Team Gukesh had planned. But then, within the next five moves, it all went pear-shaped for him. Perhaps in a bid to keep the time pressure on Ding after the fifth move, Gukesh blitzed out his sixth and seventh moves, and gave the initiative away to Ding, who found accurate responses and had a position that the engines were slightly favouring.
On move 11, Gukesh saw the time advantage evaporate, as he thought for one hour. He spent a lot of time kicking himself for what he called some “stupid” moves. He gifted away the position, had less than two minutes of thinking time per move on average, and really didn’t know where to hide, after his team crafted a superb opening choice to put him in a strong position.
“I achieved exactly what I wanted out of the opening, and then I just went crazy for some time,” he said, “I was really worried about my position.”
He was worried to the extent that he said his only intention through the middle-game was to play moves that didn’t allow him to lose on the spot. He really was just surviving on a move-to-move basis. Imagine what that does to the psyche of any player. Now imagine that player is 18 years old and is close to seeing his dream of being world champion being put on hold for at least a couple of years more.
For Gukesh to completely collapse from there would have been the understandable thing. But this is a differently-wired 18-year-old. Of course, he loves the sport, and even declines draws just so he can play some more moves and see what transpires. In this situation, he was just making what he thought were the best moves for him to survive. He went into the players’ lounge and refreshed himself, just because he thought he wasn’t thinking clearly and needed a bit of a break from the board. He was away for six minutes, which flew by following his hour-long think, putting him worse on time than Ding.
The toughest challenge when you’re in that kind of mindset is that you don’t take your chances to put your opponent on the backfoot because your sole focus is survival. Gukesh’s focus here was survival, and under the severe constraints put on him by the clock. So, when Ding gave him the chances with a series of inaccurate moves towards the end of the game, Gukesh still had to put the final touches to this win. And he did so in style.
Every inaccuracy from Ding was met with perfect precision by Gukesh in response. The defending champion, too, had the clock situation troubling him, and it was eventually that which made him make the decisive blunder, regarded by some as one of the worst made in world championship history.
In the end, Gukesh looked like a man who was more relieved than happy. Of course, he let a smile or two out during the post-match press conference, but he knew that he had dug himself a hole which could’ve swallowed him on another day.
“I think this game was just a roller-coaster. It could’ve easily gone the other way. The key was that I could accept I scr**ed up after that opening, and then I could refocus.”
The work he’s done with mental conditioning coach Paddy Upton in the build-up to this world championship, and surely those hours spent in training his mind for this match surely came to his assistance.
“He [Upton] said a lot of things that have helped me in many games, because whenever you lose your focus or you get emotional, you should come back to the game and play the best move. His teachings have really helped me a lot,” Gukesh said.
Now, he’s three good games away from the only thing he has ever wanted in his young life so far. He may have to shed a bit of the ambition that he’s always known for on the chess board, for the practicality of what the situation demands from him. In winning game 11 the way he’s done though, he’s given the chess world another demonstration of why he’s a worthy challenger, and why he’ll be a worthy world champion, if he does manage to scale what’s left of the peak over the next few days in Singapore.
