New Delhi: The leg was shaking in a nervous frenzy, deep breaths were being taken, the fingers were going through his hair, the neck was being massaged but reigning world champion D Gukesh knew that he had blundered to his third defeat in a row at the Grand Swiss chess tournament on Thursday.
A day later he was held to a 102-move draw by Divya Deshmukh. The drawn-out endgame saw the world champion (Elo rating 2767) fail to get a decisive advantage over his 2478-rated opponent.
There are times when you don’t quite know what is happening. You keep trying your best but the results just don’t come your way. It happens to the best. It happens to world champions too.
On Thursday, when he finally extended his arm to shake hands and resign, he raised his eyebrows as if to say that we’ll get past this too. But Friday showed that he wasn’t there yet. The loss against Turkiye’s 16-year-old Ediz Gurel (2631) will hurt the 2767 rated Indian GM as will the draw against Deshmukh.
Gurel is a couple of months older than Abhimanyu Mishra (the 2611-rated player who Gukesh lost to in the second round), so no new record for the youngest player to beat a world champion was set but the loss cost more rating points and sees Gukesh on the brink of falling out of the top 10.
Gukesh is now 10th on the live rating list after he lost three in a row, while Alireza Firouzja moved up to sixth and Nodirbek Abdusattorov returned to the Top 10.
Between these two defeats against Mishra and Gurel, there was the loss to Nikolas Theodorou (Elo rating 2646) of Greece
“I was excited to play the world champion quite a lot,” Gurel had said after his win. “He plays quite a few openings, so I tried to study them. And I think we were in preparation till the 20th move.
The game itself was, in Gurel’s words, “a crazy tough game.”
He added: “I actually blundered at some point and I got very miserable and I didn’t see a move. And then I thought my position was very bad, but I just thought I had to give my best, maybe he makes some mistake and I just pull things through, and luckily it happened!”
The top two from each section will make it to the Candidates tournament of 2026 that will determine the challenger for the next World Championship match in both men’s and women’s sections. So Gukesh, as the reigning champion, didn’t really need to be here.
There is experience to be gained, new tactics to be tried out but so far, his decision to play the Grand Swiss despite not needing to has backfired.
That this poor run is coming just a few days after former world champion Garry Kasparov made some pretty critical comments about Gukesh is worrying.
“Gukesh won fair and square but you can hardly call him the strongest player in the world. I don’t want to sound offensive but I think Magnus ended the era of classical world champions. Gukesh’s world championship title is very different. It’s still clear that Magnus is the strongest and Gukesh is yet to prove his superiority over others. Even players of his age category. The round 1 game against Praggnanandhaa at the Sinquefield Cup was very unimpressive. The rules are the rules and the games are the games,” Kasparov had said in August.
However, these too are lessons that the 19-year-old must learn. We have seen the other young Indian GMs like R Praggnanandhaa, Arjun Erigaisi and Nihal Sarin, who was in joint lead when play ended on Thursday, go through similar blips.
And this drop in form should, in theory, only help Gukesh in the long run. It might just get his competitive juices flowing again. At 19, his goal is to improve his game in all aspects and it is far better to do that here than in the World Championships.
His response after these defeats will be important — not just for the chess world but for himself too. For that is what distinguishes the champions from the rest.
