> These attributes are what makes chess and its superstars so appealing.
I would say that what you just described is usually called "sportsmanship" and is pretty common in most sports (with exceptions of course, but at least most would agree that it's an ideal worth aspiring to)
Gukesh then added: “You can’t hook the rook, you can’t fight the knight, black or white, I am the GREATEST OF ALL TIME! Which one of you punks is NEXT?”
Nepo and Magnus seem to be cut from a different cloth, although Magnus has never had a moment where he could demonstrate whether or not he can be humble, because he has always just crushed.
Anish Giri kind of took a shot at Magnus (with respect to his retiring from classical chess) in his early commentary with Petr Leko a few days ago. People are funny, and one doesn't usually get to be where Ding and Gukesh are without having a bit of an edge to their personality. That's what makes Ding and Gukesh so special to me.
Magnus doesn't usually direct his frustration at others (except in the infamous Hans Niemann game) but he has been known to storm out of interviews after some of his bad losses.
Magnus described Ding's abilities as a 4/10 in the lead up to the match. In match commentary he regularly called the games "baffling" (as in baffingly bad) and regularly said they weren't strong grandmaster calibre. He is definitely very conceited and resents not being the world champion, even if it's only because of his absence.
Ding's was not objective neither thoughful, Ding was completely melted down after the interview and the interview was a reflection of that. Chess is a drawn game and the gist of playing chess is to be more resilient, blunder less and exploit as many of the chances you got in your game. Matches and games are won exactly because the opponent doesn't make the best of his chances. This is the cruel nature of the game. A player like Carlsen, Karpov , Kasparov, Kramnik, Anand, Topalov or any other world champion would have felt entitled to win the last game playing White after Gukesh missed a crucial chance to close the match the game before. But no, Ding played to draw and swap pieces even when he had the initiative in the 14th game. And he lost the game with a club player blunder because he still insisted on exchanging pieces when down a pawn. It's basic knowledge that pawn endgames are decisive and you have always to calculate them exactly when entering one, that when one is down material he has to exchange pawns but not pieces, and that in general rook endgames are slighly easier to play than pawn endgames. Any master would have insisted on shuffling the rook and would have never thinked of exchanging pieces in that situation. The fact that he exchanged the rook is a reflection of Ding's terrible form.
Chess and its superstars are often anything but humble and modest. Magnus Carlsen's commetary for this match was riddled with derogatory statements. since he wanted to sit out this championship he should be gracious and respectful toward the players who fought for the title in his stead but he has been anything but that.
That was a absolutely horrible finish to a really exciting championship if you ask me.
For anyone who doesn't know, there was a lot of drama because Gukesh was playing amazingly coming into this (eg winning the gold medal on board 1 at the olympiad in crushing style) and Ding had been playing terribly. Then there were 13 games of back and forth with stalwart defending and imaginative computer preparation by both sides, playing a lot of fresh chess and both of them going for the most critical and challenging moves in each position. Ding was playing a lot better than a lot of people had expected and the previous game had been one of the best games in a world championship for a long time. Everything was tied going into the last game of the classical portion and the "bar room consensus" was that since Gukesh was so young and doesn't focus at all on the faster forms of chess (rapid and blitz) and is therefore much lower rated than Ding in those formats, that if this game was a draw then Ding would be a substantial favourite in the ensuing tiebreaks.
The final game was a complex struggle, with Ding keeping everything in lockdown with the white pieces so as not to give Gukesh a ghost of a chance. Most of the pieces had been traded and it was the most drawish of drawn endgames. Gukesh was up a pawn, but they both had a rook and bishop and all Ding had to do was hang on to his pieces and keep them well away from the enemy king. On the stream I was watching IM David Pruess had just been asked by someone in chat whether Gukesh could win and he said "1% chance".
Then all of a sudden Ding made 3 bad moves in a row. The first two were just poor endgame technique, putting his rook and bishop both on bad squares too close to the enemy king, then the real blunder. Completely inexplicably he traded off the pieces. Now he was in an endgame that was just dead lost. After 14 games of 4+ hours each It had gone from being a dead draw with him a big favourite in tie breaks to all over in a few seconds.
This really misses the key drama of what happened in the last game.
Ding had a perfectly safe position where he could try to squeeze Gukesh pretty much endlessly with basically 0 risk. He then, completely inexplicably, went down a forced line which led to the final phase of the game.
In this phase the position was drawn with perfect play, but that is completely irrelevant because it is really tough to play. And more importantly in this phase, Gukesh was the side pressing to win with all sorts of interesting ideas. Ding, by contrast, left himself in a position where he's now going to be tortured for hours, has 0 chance of winning, and a single lapse of concentration means you lose. And that's exactly what happened.
Engine evals are really misleading in these sort of positions because it says it's completely equal, which it objectively is, but white/Ding will lose that position with some degree of regularity, while black/Gukesh had 0 losing chances. So in practical terms equality is not really correct.
Yes and I think losing in this way is the most fair result. Ding has gone for a draw in every game where the score was tied, even with white (the first game, which he won as black was just a gift from Gukesh). Today, once again with white he could have pressed the position and played for more. Instead he sacrificed a pawn to play for a draw, and had the more difficult game to play even if it was always 0s. If he'd tried to play for a win today, almost certainly it would have been a draw anyway.
While I was really happy to see Ding's fighting spirit in this match, and to have recovered much of his former strength, I've been rooting for Gukesh since around the half-way point just because Ding has not been playing superior positions for a win. I just don't think thats how a champion plays, even if its a sound strategy to try to win in tie-breaks.
Is there a metric I can look at in engine evaluations to determine when a situation is "risky" for white or black (e.g., the situation above) even if it looks equal with perfect play?
I've always been interested in understanding situations where this is the case (and the opposite, where the engine favours one side but it seems to require a long, hard-to-find sequence of moves.
Playing out the top lines helps if equality requires perfect play from one side.
Not the mention the time trouble that Ding left himself in once again. This time Gukesh ended with almost a full hour over Ding. When you put yourself in a tough position, no matter how drawish it is in theory, you need to have enough time to figure out the ideas of the position and with only 10 minutes left and 30 seconds per move, you might slip up and make a quick move when you really needed to think harder.
Chess engines should come with another metric bar: "The twitchy-ness" of the position aka the gradient of primary eval metric as you pareto the possible moves from best to worst. The stronger this gradient, the more risky it is to play, and more changes to make a mistake.
It's strange/crazy because Ding even purposefully even gave up his B pawn, just so he could exchange queens and be in a 3 and 2 pawn game with a bishop and rook still in the game. Gukesh just tried playing out the game to the last second making easy moves while Ding suffered.
Gukesh took him into the deep water the entire time, putting every possible strain on Ding's energy and reserves. It was the unrelenting pressure of an 18yo badass that cracked Ding, whom I truly feel sorry for. He is a great player and a very, very nice human being.
What is crazy is that Gukesh has only been playing chess for a little more than 11 years.
"only 11 years"... that seems like a lot to me, although reading further down in the thread it seems like it might take twice or three times as long to get to a very high level.
Do people in the chess community measure players by number of years playing? Are there expectations of how long it takes to get to a certain level? (besides world champion)
Disagree. Gukesh was constantly putting pressure on Ding to find defensive moves and Ding finally made a mistake. The fact that it happened when it did just makes it even more dramatic. We know from the other matches that Ding is capable of finding them, and the fact that he didn't just highlights that they're both human, both under extreme pressure and that it's not just mindless computation.
I'm not sure we disagree at all. Gukesh's strategy throughout the match was to constantly ask difficult questions and the surprise really was that Ding didn't fold earlier.
I disagree completely. In the eyes of some modern fans, the popularity of engines and eval bars has reduced chess to an intellectual and computational exercise. It's too easy to say "bad moves" and "blunder" when Stockfish is giving you all the answers!
In reality, chess is a fighting contest between two flesh-and-blood humans. And that's what we see throughout this exciting match, and in this final game.
Gukesh won because of his greater fighting spirit throughout the match, which is as it should be. (Similar to how Ding played the daring move ...Rg6 in the final game of his match against Nepo.)
That isn't how most appreciate sports. People are hoping for the contenders to be at the top of their game towards the end of the championships. Nobody says "Hey, at least this has a human touch! I'm sick of basketball video games." if the NBA finals are relatively boring one year.
I think maybe "that was a absolutely horrible finish" got interpreted as saying that the win wasn't well earned. That's not how I saw it at all.
The whole time, Ding had failed to seize advantages and been low on time — something criticized by GM Hikaru Nakamura. In this final game, those two things caused him to blunder in a complex endgame seeking a tie against Gukesh who had nearly an hour of advantage on the clock and been relentlessly pressing the whole match (and continued that pressure, into the endgame).
That’s a strategy, not mere misfortune. And personally, I’m glad it was decided in the match rather than tie-breaks.
It felt much more like forced error than unforced error or, thematically, the closest thing I’ve seen to a milling strategy in chess. Just make them keep drawing until they’re out of ideas.
It was a forced error in the sense that Ding forced that exact endgame for no real reason and then fluffed it with 10 minutes on his clock plus increment. What's incredibly sad is that Ding clawed his way back into the match in game 12 by doing exactly what you describe - he created a horribly cramped position, refused to release the tension, and eventually Gukesh ran out of good moves and lost without any egregious blunders.
I'm explicitly not a chess player but this reminds me of Dave Sirlin's "Play To Win" where he starts by explaining that if doing a thing makes you not lose, you do that, and then eventually by definition you win.
I have little interest in chess and no real knowledge in its current events beyond mainstream media coverage, but always enjoy lively writeups of the matches like this one.
No, they use chess engines to find interesting lines of play that the opponent presumably is not prepared for. Say, an odd move that looks weak, but a few moves later is back at even, and the player that pushed down this line is now prepared to play on from there (with perhaps further traps laid ahead), while the opponent is somewhat in the dark and has to analyze the situation correctly.
Normal, regular chess engines are sometimes called AI. Or at least they were back in 1997. And people have certainly made themed variants of these chess engines, which purport to simulate certain famous chess players.
If anyone’s interested in what a GM’s thought process on the game looks like there’s a really great recap here which was produced without engines [1] https://youtu.be/97RZHG2rcbc?si=O41BRi2EC8Ryu0v2
[1] With the intention of trying to as honestly as possible replicate the situation for the players where obviously they have to think for themselves and don’t have access to an engine while playing.
My best guess is he started feeling some time pressure and really wanted to trade for a clear draw, but crucially miscalculated the tempo and position of the K vs KP ending.
I'm not a grandmaster though, so I can only vaguely speculate since that's how I would have lost :)
> After 14 games of 4+ hours each It had gone from being a dead draw with him a big favourite in tie breaks to all over in a few seconds.
_Very_ casual chess follower here. Why was Ding a big favorite in the tie breaks? My takeaway from the match was that Ding seemed to always be worse on time, so wouldn't a shorter time control favor Gukesh?
The World Chess Championship uses rapid and blitz matches (much shorter time controls) for tie breaks. Gukesh is 46th in the world in rapid, and 82nd in blitz. Ding is 2nd and 6th.
Ding is rated over 100 points higher in rapid than Gukesh. The choice to spend time early was a choice by Ding and Ding's team. Ding is better at faster time controls than Gukesh, Gukesh was better prepared.
Most of the more sophisticated people I know are completely disinterested in sports. Not that they dislike sports, it just never occupies their mind. Sports is a purposeless activity for kids
Chess is different from sports in only one way: the loss of very intelligent capable people who could be helping to create the future.
I'll take smart people playing chess any day over those people choosing to go into the tech industry where they spend all their time building addictive products that drive ad impressions.
I'd love it if they put their talents to work by going into medical research, chemistry / materials science, or even political science and try to take meaningful steps towards making the world a better place. That route seems to be a lot less popular these days and obviously compensation has a lot to do with it.
Disagree, but I have a funny anecdote in your favor.
My university's top Dota player was a 2.x GPA slacker who did nothing but play games all day. Guy was going to continue wasting-away by going to a mediocre foreign grad school, but he got his admit revoked because of stupid visa reasons.
Life hits him in the face and for 1 year, he quits dota and studies. Goes in, bags 99.99 percentile score in exam with 300k applicants and ends up at my country's HBS. That's the power level dota was holding back.
To be fair, a team of chess grand-masters tried to form a dota team once, and got destroyed. So maybe dota is harder. Speaking from personal experience, I haven't done anything in life that's as all consuming, rewarding or as destructive as dota.
> Chess is different from sports in only one way: the loss of very intelligent capable people who could be helping to create the future.
Being good at chess does not mean you're "very intelligent". Most of the top players are good at chess because they are very good at memorization & pattern recognition, those are the actual abilities of a high level chess player. Does that translate into other intellectual pursuits like theoretical physics or math? Not really.
Grandmasters aren't going to be dumb by any stretch of the imagination, but they aren't super-intelligent geniuses, either.
Okay, let's say we built the future to your satisfaction, and then what? We would probably play games. How much future do you need to build before it's okay to enjoy your time alive immersed in trivialities?
Intelligent people who create the future must choose that path for themselves. Chess isn't preventing people from making that choice. If chess didn't exist, most chess players would probably just be playing some other game instead of STEM careers or whatever your definition of creating the future is. Also plenty of very strong chess players do ultimately wind up pursuing other career paths. And then there's also the fact that a good number of the top chess players have shown themselves to be highly dysfunctional people who are unfit for the professional world such as Bobby Fischer and Vladimir Kramnik.
Honestly this sounds like a knock-on effect of the US's constant erosion of the glue of community. Church attendance down, sport attendance down, theater attendance with friends down, it's all the same.
Social norms can change this -- the Netherlands has a very similar culture to the US, But one thing people asked me while I was doing my M.Sc. there was just, "what is your sport?" ... and I got asked it enough that I eventually got one, and then for a good period of time I managed to completely kick my obesity, until I moved back to the American Midwest.
The introvert/extrovert axis also plays a role in what sort of "sport" is right for you, of course, and many of your sophisticated friends still hit the gym or jog etc. -- those are just sports for introverts in my view.
Sport time is not, time that could have been better spent elsewhere. It's like how cleaning the sink isn't time that could have been better spent elsewhere -- if you don't have a clean sink, you'll pay the interest in terms of "ugh what's that smell [...] oh it was the standing water in this bowl" and "crap I don't have a clean glass, hm, I wonder if I can just buy compostable cups on Amazon so that I don't have that problem..." etc. So as an extrovert, I can go once a week to play soccer with friends in a small league, or, just hear me out, I can get lonely and then do what I do when I get lonely, which is pop on Physics Stack Exchange and answer physics questions so that I can feel Of Use. You pay the interest either way.
Chess-time also is no great loss for the world. The top-level world chess community is something we have numbers for -- 17k titled players, 2k grandmasters, 4k international masters beneath that. They are pursuing something that exactly fits the nerdy way that their brain works -- memorize openings out to 20 moves deep, obsessively study and re-study their failed games to understand why the computer thinks they lost and how they might make better mistakes in the future, and for them it HAS to be competitive and they HAVE to have that immediate feedback of trying a new idea in the same narrow niche of ideas that they became a super-expert-in, against another top player who can punish their new mistakes.
It's just not a set of transferable world-changing skills. It's like, my brother became single-mindedly obsessed with pool in High School. This persists even though he now runs a small company operating a strip mall. This was just his thing, he loves that there is no upper bound to how much control he can have over the cue and the balls, using the spins of each to control the layout, and precisely planning a course through a 9-ball break and setting himself up for a clean sweep through the game. There was no world in which some "world-changing create-the-future" lifestyle, would have felt as much of a glove fitting his hand to him, as this did. And it is no great loss for the world that he found the glove that fits his hand. It's not like the strip mall would have become an American retail empire rivaling Amazon, if only he had spent his nighttime hours working on the mall instead of on his life passion.
For comparison, probably most of the people in the bottom 10% performance bracket at Google are being told and pressured "you need to do more, more, more, you're gonna get fired if you keep those low numbers up" and at 180k employees, that amounts to 18k people that, unlike top chess players, probably _could_ flourish and do better in some smaller scrappier company, but because America doesn't have a social safety net to speak of, they feel like "well I got the dream 6-figure job, I better hold onto that until my knuckles are white because if I got fired, Bay Area rent and cost-of-living could bankrupt me in 3 months." And that's literally just one megatech company, not even talking about the world of people Graeber argues are doing "bullshit jobs" etc. etc.
Only started following chess due to the covid shutdowns, much for fun from a fans point of view than I had imagined it would be. Having the computer evaluation at the side really helps novices like me to know what's going on, interestingly a case of superior computer players helping as mere mortals to appreciate the game.
I used to watch a lot of Go. I watched live as Lee Sedol beat AlphaGo in one single game in the last match a human could feasibly compete against AI. Against all odds, and knowing AI had overtaken us, Lee Sedol found a move to get one last victory. [1]
But I never saw anything like the crowd hype from the clip you posted, lol. This was next level in terms of the energy in the room. Very fun, thanks for sharing!
Just curious: The comment you're replying to had the link with timestamp 4:01:38 which is basically just before the move happens; is that not enough as it is?
Wow. What a match. Been watching with my son, a chess lover since we started watching the Magnus-Fabi match. Now, my son loves his chess club and has retired me from playing :-)
Two thoughts:
1) Gukesh took Ding into the deep water the entire time. Few people realize how draining chess is, especially at that level for this time control. It's beyond gruelling. Only programming is more difficult ;-)
2) Gukesh had an extraordinary advantage. His mental health and resilience over the course of the match were a testament to it. And, then, his graciousness, thankfulness, and humble joy demonstrated the Way. It was That which Gukesh first thanked in his post-match interview with GM Mo. It was how he first began each game.
And That was the difference. That said, being 18 didn't hurt either :-)
First of all, I have the greatest respect for the two individuals who played their hearts out in this event.
Personally, I'm on the side which thinks that this format is a total stagnation. Maybe the new no-increment under 40 moves is an improvement, but overall it does not count. I agree with Carlsen that the format has to be drastically changed to determine who is the better player. Much more games, shorter games. Fischer said a long time ago that chess is dead. Considering how deep some of the variations go into theoretical territory, I can surely relate. Magnus has also expressed that it's very hard to find novelties. I'm also totally on the side that Fischer Random (chess 960) has to be included in this tournament. I believe that ultimately it will happen - sooner or later. Magnus also said that he thinks that his match with Caruana was of extremely high quality - those 14 games were all draws. I totally understand why Magnus didn't want to defend his title. On the other hand I can't comprehend how FIDE let this happen because a lot of people don't think of current tournament as high as they maybe should be, just because Magnus is not participating. That's a shame. Not on Carlsen, not on chess. On FIDE.
> Personally, I'm on the side which thinks that this format is a total stagnation.
I was with you until this WCC.
In almost every game, Gukesh took Ding out of prep extremely early. It wasn't always a success for him either! Leaving the opening book typically means you accept an objectively-worse position, but one that your opponent has to spend a significant amount of time finding the right ideas in. Even in the cases where Ding found the right idea, Gukesh put him in serous time-trouble as a result.
Yes, many of the games resulted in draws. But they were extremely sharp and imbalanced, and in virtually every game one side of the board (typically Gukesh) had a serious advantage and very strong attacking opportunities. The resulting draws were due to not finding the right ideas in time (and very likely both players psyching themselves out of the "obvious" correct move) rather than inherently boring and drawn positions.
Overall it seemed to be an extremely effective strategy for Gukesh. But it was also actually exciting to watch unlike some previous WCCs where almost every game was likely in prep through the first 20+ moves and where the resulting positions had ample drawing chances for both sides.
This lacks some context. Gukesh took Ding out of prep bc Gukesh prepped for 7 months, while Ding prepped for 3 weeks and basically wanted to retire from chess. Ding would be out of prep by move 8 as white and be an hour down on time very consistently.
I agree, watching the World Rapid and Blitz Championships is more intense and interesting (IMO), for sure. That said, it's much more difficult for a non like me to follow those games; I can't even imagine how tiring it is for the commenters in those shorter time formats. Commenting those games is its own very specialized skillset.
I find it funny when people say it's not on Carlsen when it was entirely his decision to not compete. We already have rapid and blitz world championships that are separate. This is the classical world championship and I think the format is both exciting to watch and decently fair.
I don’t know what you’re talking about. Maybe for someone that watched every chess game all year that might be the case but I watched all 14 of these games and thought they were fantastic.
of this tournament, i think magnus would have loved to play against ding, and not at all gukesh.
prep memorization remains a bit of a cheat where its your memorization and prep picking thats playing the game, rather than actually playing the game.
i think a randomly chosen "start from x position, with y time, and z increment after move c" for some 30 games over two weeks would do pretty well. Steal the formats from engine chess.
I think after the performances seen in the match, it is fair to say, that Carlsen would probably have won against both of them, at some point taking the lead and they might have never evened the score after that.
I enjoyed the entire match and was surprised to see Ding putting up such a good fight given his poor form going into the match and Gukesh's great form after leading India to gold at the Olympiads.
Ding was inconsistent at times but had moments of brilliance where he played like an engine, unfortunately he also exhibited poor time management throughout the match and failed to capitalize on his chances where he instead seemed content to play for draws whereas Gukesh would take every opportunity to play on, even when it would require taking a slight disadvantage.
Unfortunately the last game was lost more than it was won, as Ding was looking for every chance to draw where he gave up a pawn in order to trade queens and a pair of rooks to go into an equal pawn down end game, which he eventually blundered under time pressure. It's a common sentiment in chess that to get a draw you have to play for a win, ultimately Gukesh's tenacity to keep games going and applying constant pressure eventually rewarded him as history's youngest Chess World Champion.
There's also a decent amount of controversy around really young GMs. Basically that their parents game the system by choosing official tournaments with burnt out GMs with low ratings so they can get their norms easier. Mishra recently had a lot of backlash from top GMs with those types of accusations. If that's true, those players will likely never reach the top ranks, but who knows.
We're still relatively early in the chess engine era and there was an explosion of new young talent discovering chess in the covid years. I expect to see more young chess prodigies.
Gukesh has beaten Magnus before. Sure Magnus is an demi god of chess but we haven’t seen him play this format against gukesh and that’s entirely his fault.
What is the deal with Gukesh's last name? It's officially listed as just D on his FIDE profile. I asked a couple Indian coworkers who said it was probably just being abbreviated for being long, but honestly it's not that long of a name and Gukesh isn't from the same region as them. I've read elsewhere that Telugu speaking people don't really use last names.
Gukesh's last name is Dommaraju. It's his family surname. He is a Telugu person by birth, but he grew up in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. In the state of Tamil Nadu, people often take their father's given names as their last names, and always write it in abbreviation. Indian last names often disclose caste, and due to a widely influential movement in TN (see [0]), most people of TN gave up using caste-based surnames, and switched to solely using father's names. But, the father's name is often written as the first letter of that name, and the person is called like that in official places, too. Among friends, colleagues, teachers, etc., only the given name ever is used.
As Gukesh grew up in Chennai, he used his last name like that. His parents also use one name only.
Anecdote: my distant cousin, a Bengali, also grew up in TN. His parents also Tamilized his name. His name was, say, Rama Dass, and he went by and put his name as D. Rama, or Rama D.
When their family moved back to Bengal, his name was Rama Dass again.
Srinivasa Ramanujan's given name was Ramanujan, and Srinivasa was his father's name.
Naming conventions vary, and when you consider names across history/geography, it is the present-day Western convention of "GivenName FamilyName" that is unusual and needs explanation.
Generally speaking, someone is born and at some point days/months later, their parents start calling them by some name, while the rest of the world might also doing so at some point, possibly different people using different names. For purposes of interacting with administrative systems yet another name may be adopted. Only when it has been necessary to distinguish between multiple people with the same name do secondary names start getting used, either occupational descriptions (John the Baker vs John the Carpenter vs John the Smith) or places where they came from or were noted for (Jesus of Nazareth, William of Orange, Leonardo from Vinci), or disambiguating with parents' names (Mohammed bin [son of] Salman, Björk Guðmundsdóttir [daughter of Guðmund]) — these are all conventions still existing today, with occasional funny consequences when someone imagines one of these to be a "family name" that persists from father to child across generations. (See "what would Of Nazareth do" about people—even otherwise educated ones—treating “da Vinci” as such.)
Coming to India: there are different conventions. Typically just a name and an initial letter (placed either before or after the name) to distinguish between multiple people (in the same classroom say) with that name. When a boy was named "Anand" by his parents, because his father was "K. Viswanathan", he became "V. Anand" in school records, and this is the name I remember reading articles about this chess prodigy in Indian newspapers. At some point the international press started spelling out his first name and called him "Viswanathan Anand", putting his father's name first, and even started calling him "Viswanathan" or "Vishy" — he used to object and point out that they were calling him by his father's name, but eventually he just got used to it and even began to like it. In this generation, this boy was named "Gukesh" by his parents, and was "D. Gukesh" in school records and news reports, but somewhat wisely they decided for international sources to put the initial after the name, so "Gukesh D", and for those who cannot handle just an initial, spell it out to "Gukesh Dommaraju".
(You have had other replies claiming this to have something to do with Tamil Nadu anti-caste politics. While no doubt that movement discouraged the use of caste names as surnames, the initial convention pre-exists any of those political movements and exists in parallel in other states too. E.g. "S. Ramanujan" was the name on his early papers before the movement being spoken of. Some families/communities use surnames (in the sense you're thinking of) and some don't; that's all there is to it.)
In Tamil Nadu, an initial is often used in the surname due to the Periyar/Dravidian movement in the 20th century. Furthermore, plenty of people in Tamil Nadu historically didn't even use surnames.
Gukesh is Telugu, but his family are Chennai natives. Chennai becoming part of TN instead of Telugu-speaking Andhra Pradesh was very politically charged in the early days of India.
As a South Indian My name (in public school records) till I was age 21, was <name>. <initial>
I was forced to pick the last name for passport purposes and typically i either have the option of attaching my dad's name or my dad's town name.
My wife, didn't even do that and when she migrated to US, she was <name> LNU (short for Last Name Unknown). While applying for greencard we decided it was too much of a hassle for her and she attached her father's name
> when she migrated to US, she was <name> LNU (short for Last Name Unknown).
Interesting!
The loser of the previous World Chess Championship match was Russia's Ian Nepomniachtchi. His last name means "one who doesn't remember [his last name]" -when asked by the Czar's census taker!
I guess this kind of thing happens in many countries.
Yes. I am Telugu and family name is usually not written or called out. So he would usually write D. Gukesh or Gukesh D. Most people also have a sort of middle name for example D. Gukesh Kumar. Middle name is spelled and used for calling together with main name.
Readit News
> How do you feel?
> I think I played my best tournament of the year. I think it was a fair tournament in the end. I have no regrets.
> Any message for fans?
> Thank you, I will continue to play, I hope I can show strength like this time.
Gukesh was equally as objective, humble, and gentlemanly in victory.
These attributes are what makes chess and its superstars so appealing.
I would say that what you just described is usually called "sportsmanship" and is pretty common in most sports (with exceptions of course, but at least most would agree that it's an ideal worth aspiring to)
Nepo and Magnus seem to be cut from a different cloth, although Magnus has never had a moment where he could demonstrate whether or not he can be humble, because he has always just crushed.
Anish Giri kind of took a shot at Magnus (with respect to his retiring from classical chess) in his early commentary with Petr Leko a few days ago. People are funny, and one doesn't usually get to be where Ding and Gukesh are without having a bit of an edge to their personality. That's what makes Ding and Gukesh so special to me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmYAvrJjWsY&t=33s
For anyone who doesn't know, there was a lot of drama because Gukesh was playing amazingly coming into this (eg winning the gold medal on board 1 at the olympiad in crushing style) and Ding had been playing terribly. Then there were 13 games of back and forth with stalwart defending and imaginative computer preparation by both sides, playing a lot of fresh chess and both of them going for the most critical and challenging moves in each position. Ding was playing a lot better than a lot of people had expected and the previous game had been one of the best games in a world championship for a long time. Everything was tied going into the last game of the classical portion and the "bar room consensus" was that since Gukesh was so young and doesn't focus at all on the faster forms of chess (rapid and blitz) and is therefore much lower rated than Ding in those formats, that if this game was a draw then Ding would be a substantial favourite in the ensuing tiebreaks.
The final game was a complex struggle, with Ding keeping everything in lockdown with the white pieces so as not to give Gukesh a ghost of a chance. Most of the pieces had been traded and it was the most drawish of drawn endgames. Gukesh was up a pawn, but they both had a rook and bishop and all Ding had to do was hang on to his pieces and keep them well away from the enemy king. On the stream I was watching IM David Pruess had just been asked by someone in chat whether Gukesh could win and he said "1% chance".
Then all of a sudden Ding made 3 bad moves in a row. The first two were just poor endgame technique, putting his rook and bishop both on bad squares too close to the enemy king, then the real blunder. Completely inexplicably he traded off the pieces. Now he was in an endgame that was just dead lost. After 14 games of 4+ hours each It had gone from being a dead draw with him a big favourite in tie breaks to all over in a few seconds.
Ding had a perfectly safe position where he could try to squeeze Gukesh pretty much endlessly with basically 0 risk. He then, completely inexplicably, went down a forced line which led to the final phase of the game.
In this phase the position was drawn with perfect play, but that is completely irrelevant because it is really tough to play. And more importantly in this phase, Gukesh was the side pressing to win with all sorts of interesting ideas. Ding, by contrast, left himself in a position where he's now going to be tortured for hours, has 0 chance of winning, and a single lapse of concentration means you lose. And that's exactly what happened.
Engine evals are really misleading in these sort of positions because it says it's completely equal, which it objectively is, but white/Ding will lose that position with some degree of regularity, while black/Gukesh had 0 losing chances. So in practical terms equality is not really correct.
While I was really happy to see Ding's fighting spirit in this match, and to have recovered much of his former strength, I've been rooting for Gukesh since around the half-way point just because Ding has not been playing superior positions for a win. I just don't think thats how a champion plays, even if its a sound strategy to try to win in tie-breaks.
I've always been interested in understanding situations where this is the case (and the opposite, where the engine favours one side but it seems to require a long, hard-to-find sequence of moves.
Playing out the top lines helps if equality requires perfect play from one side.
Dead Comment
What is crazy is that Gukesh has only been playing chess for a little more than 11 years.
ETA: And Ding fought like a lion!
Do people in the chess community measure players by number of years playing? Are there expectations of how long it takes to get to a certain level? (besides world champion)
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In reality, chess is a fighting contest between two flesh-and-blood humans. And that's what we see throughout this exciting match, and in this final game.
Gukesh won because of his greater fighting spirit throughout the match, which is as it should be. (Similar to how Ding played the daring move ...Rg6 in the final game of his match against Nepo.)
I think maybe "that was a absolutely horrible finish" got interpreted as saying that the win wasn't well earned. That's not how I saw it at all.
The whole time, Ding had failed to seize advantages and been low on time — something criticized by GM Hikaru Nakamura. In this final game, those two things caused him to blunder in a complex endgame seeking a tie against Gukesh who had nearly an hour of advantage on the clock and been relentlessly pressing the whole match (and continued that pressure, into the endgame).
That’s a strategy, not mere misfortune. And personally, I’m glad it was decided in the match rather than tie-breaks.
Are people training AIs to play in the style of the people they're going to play against so they can practice?
Right now you can visit https://www.chess.com/play/computer and play a Hikaru-themed chess engine - or a MrBeast-themed chess engine.
I don't know how deep the simulation goes, though - they might all just be the same engine with a different difficulty setting and a different icon.
[1] With the intention of trying to as honestly as possible replicate the situation for the players where obviously they have to think for themselves and don’t have access to an engine while playing.
he streamed watching most of the openings, and kept his own eval bar on the side, occassionally checking his lines against strong engines
I'm not a grandmaster though, so I can only vaguely speculate since that's how I would have lost :)
_Very_ casual chess follower here. Why was Ding a big favorite in the tie breaks? My takeaway from the match was that Ding seemed to always be worse on time, so wouldn't a shorter time control favor Gukesh?
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There was almost no preparation from Ding side. It was very weak.
Dead Comment
Most of the more sophisticated people I know are completely disinterested in sports. Not that they dislike sports, it just never occupies their mind. Sports is a purposeless activity for kids
Chess is different from sports in only one way: the loss of very intelligent capable people who could be helping to create the future.
Chess is even more tragic than the olympics.
I'd love it if they put their talents to work by going into medical research, chemistry / materials science, or even political science and try to take meaningful steps towards making the world a better place. That route seems to be a lot less popular these days and obviously compensation has a lot to do with it.
My university's top Dota player was a 2.x GPA slacker who did nothing but play games all day. Guy was going to continue wasting-away by going to a mediocre foreign grad school, but he got his admit revoked because of stupid visa reasons.
Life hits him in the face and for 1 year, he quits dota and studies. Goes in, bags 99.99 percentile score in exam with 300k applicants and ends up at my country's HBS. That's the power level dota was holding back.
To be fair, a team of chess grand-masters tried to form a dota team once, and got destroyed. So maybe dota is harder. Speaking from personal experience, I haven't done anything in life that's as all consuming, rewarding or as destructive as dota.
Don't do Dota kids. Try drugs.
Being good at chess does not mean you're "very intelligent". Most of the top players are good at chess because they are very good at memorization & pattern recognition, those are the actual abilities of a high level chess player. Does that translate into other intellectual pursuits like theoretical physics or math? Not really.
Grandmasters aren't going to be dumb by any stretch of the imagination, but they aren't super-intelligent geniuses, either.
That most of the society thinks so is a failure of our systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Morphy
It's also worth noting that very few people make a living from playing chess, so they're probably still available for your future plans.
Social norms can change this -- the Netherlands has a very similar culture to the US, But one thing people asked me while I was doing my M.Sc. there was just, "what is your sport?" ... and I got asked it enough that I eventually got one, and then for a good period of time I managed to completely kick my obesity, until I moved back to the American Midwest.
The introvert/extrovert axis also plays a role in what sort of "sport" is right for you, of course, and many of your sophisticated friends still hit the gym or jog etc. -- those are just sports for introverts in my view.
Sport time is not, time that could have been better spent elsewhere. It's like how cleaning the sink isn't time that could have been better spent elsewhere -- if you don't have a clean sink, you'll pay the interest in terms of "ugh what's that smell [...] oh it was the standing water in this bowl" and "crap I don't have a clean glass, hm, I wonder if I can just buy compostable cups on Amazon so that I don't have that problem..." etc. So as an extrovert, I can go once a week to play soccer with friends in a small league, or, just hear me out, I can get lonely and then do what I do when I get lonely, which is pop on Physics Stack Exchange and answer physics questions so that I can feel Of Use. You pay the interest either way.
Chess-time also is no great loss for the world. The top-level world chess community is something we have numbers for -- 17k titled players, 2k grandmasters, 4k international masters beneath that. They are pursuing something that exactly fits the nerdy way that their brain works -- memorize openings out to 20 moves deep, obsessively study and re-study their failed games to understand why the computer thinks they lost and how they might make better mistakes in the future, and for them it HAS to be competitive and they HAVE to have that immediate feedback of trying a new idea in the same narrow niche of ideas that they became a super-expert-in, against another top player who can punish their new mistakes.
It's just not a set of transferable world-changing skills. It's like, my brother became single-mindedly obsessed with pool in High School. This persists even though he now runs a small company operating a strip mall. This was just his thing, he loves that there is no upper bound to how much control he can have over the cue and the balls, using the spins of each to control the layout, and precisely planning a course through a 9-ball break and setting himself up for a clean sweep through the game. There was no world in which some "world-changing create-the-future" lifestyle, would have felt as much of a glove fitting his hand to him, as this did. And it is no great loss for the world that he found the glove that fits his hand. It's not like the strip mall would have become an American retail empire rivaling Amazon, if only he had spent his nighttime hours working on the mall instead of on his life passion.
For comparison, probably most of the people in the bottom 10% performance bracket at Google are being told and pressured "you need to do more, more, more, you're gonna get fired if you keep those low numbers up" and at 180k employees, that amounts to 18k people that, unlike top chess players, probably _could_ flourish and do better in some smaller scrappier company, but because America doesn't have a social safety net to speak of, they feel like "well I got the dream 6-figure job, I better hold onto that until my knuckles are white because if I got fired, Bay Area rent and cost-of-living could bankrupt me in 3 months." And that's literally just one megatech company, not even talking about the world of people Graeber argues are doing "bullshit jobs" etc. etc.
Only started following chess due to the covid shutdowns, much for fun from a fans point of view than I had imagined it would be. Having the computer evaluation at the side really helps novices like me to know what's going on, interestingly a case of superior computer players helping as mere mortals to appreciate the game.
But I never saw anything like the crowd hype from the clip you posted, lol. This was next level in terms of the energy in the room. Very fun, thanks for sharing!
[1] https://youtu.be/mzZWPcgcRD0
Two thoughts:
1) Gukesh took Ding into the deep water the entire time. Few people realize how draining chess is, especially at that level for this time control. It's beyond gruelling. Only programming is more difficult ;-)
2) Gukesh had an extraordinary advantage. His mental health and resilience over the course of the match were a testament to it. And, then, his graciousness, thankfulness, and humble joy demonstrated the Way. It was That which Gukesh first thanked in his post-match interview with GM Mo. It was how he first began each game.
And That was the difference. That said, being 18 didn't hurt either :-)
Personally, I'm on the side which thinks that this format is a total stagnation. Maybe the new no-increment under 40 moves is an improvement, but overall it does not count. I agree with Carlsen that the format has to be drastically changed to determine who is the better player. Much more games, shorter games. Fischer said a long time ago that chess is dead. Considering how deep some of the variations go into theoretical territory, I can surely relate. Magnus has also expressed that it's very hard to find novelties. I'm also totally on the side that Fischer Random (chess 960) has to be included in this tournament. I believe that ultimately it will happen - sooner or later. Magnus also said that he thinks that his match with Caruana was of extremely high quality - those 14 games were all draws. I totally understand why Magnus didn't want to defend his title. On the other hand I can't comprehend how FIDE let this happen because a lot of people don't think of current tournament as high as they maybe should be, just because Magnus is not participating. That's a shame. Not on Carlsen, not on chess. On FIDE.
I was with you until this WCC.
In almost every game, Gukesh took Ding out of prep extremely early. It wasn't always a success for him either! Leaving the opening book typically means you accept an objectively-worse position, but one that your opponent has to spend a significant amount of time finding the right ideas in. Even in the cases where Ding found the right idea, Gukesh put him in serous time-trouble as a result.
Yes, many of the games resulted in draws. But they were extremely sharp and imbalanced, and in virtually every game one side of the board (typically Gukesh) had a serious advantage and very strong attacking opportunities. The resulting draws were due to not finding the right ideas in time (and very likely both players psyching themselves out of the "obvious" correct move) rather than inherently boring and drawn positions.
Overall it seemed to be an extremely effective strategy for Gukesh. But it was also actually exciting to watch unlike some previous WCCs where almost every game was likely in prep through the first 20+ moves and where the resulting positions had ample drawing chances for both sides.
Nepo Magnus game 6, Nepo Ding many many games, Nepo Caruana draw on round 14 of candidates. ALL OF THEM WERE TERRIFIC GAMES.
I don't understand what people mean by stagnation
prep memorization remains a bit of a cheat where its your memorization and prep picking thats playing the game, rather than actually playing the game.
i think a randomly chosen "start from x position, with y time, and z increment after move c" for some 30 games over two weeks would do pretty well. Steal the formats from engine chess.
Ding was inconsistent at times but had moments of brilliance where he played like an engine, unfortunately he also exhibited poor time management throughout the match and failed to capitalize on his chances where he instead seemed content to play for draws whereas Gukesh would take every opportunity to play on, even when it would require taking a slight disadvantage.
Unfortunately the last game was lost more than it was won, as Ding was looking for every chance to draw where he gave up a pawn in order to trade queens and a pair of rooks to go into an equal pawn down end game, which he eventually blundered under time pressure. It's a common sentiment in chess that to get a draw you have to play for a win, ultimately Gukesh's tenacity to keep games going and applying constant pressure eventually rewarded him as history's youngest Chess World Champion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_prodigy
As Gukesh grew up in Chennai, he used his last name like that. His parents also use one name only.
Anecdote: my distant cousin, a Bengali, also grew up in TN. His parents also Tamilized his name. His name was, say, Rama Dass, and he went by and put his name as D. Rama, or Rama D.
When their family moved back to Bengal, his name was Rama Dass again.
Srinivasa Ramanujan's given name was Ramanujan, and Srinivasa was his father's name.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periyar
Generally speaking, someone is born and at some point days/months later, their parents start calling them by some name, while the rest of the world might also doing so at some point, possibly different people using different names. For purposes of interacting with administrative systems yet another name may be adopted. Only when it has been necessary to distinguish between multiple people with the same name do secondary names start getting used, either occupational descriptions (John the Baker vs John the Carpenter vs John the Smith) or places where they came from or were noted for (Jesus of Nazareth, William of Orange, Leonardo from Vinci), or disambiguating with parents' names (Mohammed bin [son of] Salman, Björk Guðmundsdóttir [daughter of Guðmund]) — these are all conventions still existing today, with occasional funny consequences when someone imagines one of these to be a "family name" that persists from father to child across generations. (See "what would Of Nazareth do" about people—even otherwise educated ones—treating “da Vinci” as such.)
Coming to India: there are different conventions. Typically just a name and an initial letter (placed either before or after the name) to distinguish between multiple people (in the same classroom say) with that name. When a boy was named "Anand" by his parents, because his father was "K. Viswanathan", he became "V. Anand" in school records, and this is the name I remember reading articles about this chess prodigy in Indian newspapers. At some point the international press started spelling out his first name and called him "Viswanathan Anand", putting his father's name first, and even started calling him "Viswanathan" or "Vishy" — he used to object and point out that they were calling him by his father's name, but eventually he just got used to it and even began to like it. In this generation, this boy was named "Gukesh" by his parents, and was "D. Gukesh" in school records and news reports, but somewhat wisely they decided for international sources to put the initial after the name, so "Gukesh D", and for those who cannot handle just an initial, spell it out to "Gukesh Dommaraju".
(You have had other replies claiming this to have something to do with Tamil Nadu anti-caste politics. While no doubt that movement discouraged the use of caste names as surnames, the initial convention pre-exists any of those political movements and exists in parallel in other states too. E.g. "S. Ramanujan" was the name on his early papers before the movement being spoken of. Some families/communities use surnames (in the sense you're thinking of) and some don't; that's all there is to it.)
In Tamil Nadu, an initial is often used in the surname due to the Periyar/Dravidian movement in the 20th century. Furthermore, plenty of people in Tamil Nadu historically didn't even use surnames.
Gukesh is Telugu, but his family are Chennai natives. Chennai becoming part of TN instead of Telugu-speaking Andhra Pradesh was very politically charged in the early days of India.
I was forced to pick the last name for passport purposes and typically i either have the option of attaching my dad's name or my dad's town name.
My wife, didn't even do that and when she migrated to US, she was <name> LNU (short for Last Name Unknown). While applying for greencard we decided it was too much of a hassle for her and she attached her father's name
Interesting!
The loser of the previous World Chess Championship match was Russia's Ian Nepomniachtchi. His last name means "one who doesn't remember [his last name]" -when asked by the Czar's census taker!
I guess this kind of thing happens in many countries.