Gukesh’s path to becoming the king of the world began when he was six-year-old. His parents enrolled him in a summer camp at his school, Velammal Vidyalaya. It was love at first sight. Even back then, he had a deep desire to do something special in the world of chess. “I have been dreaming about this moment and living it since I was six or seven,” he said.Gukesh said he watched the Viswanathan Anand-Magnus Carlsen World Championship match in Chennai as a spectator when he was a 7-year-old. “I was in the stands, looking inside the glass box where the players were. I felt it would be so cool to be inside one day,” he said after beating Liren. “When Magnus won, I thought I really want to be the one to bring back the title to India.”After rising up through the ranks rapidly, he began training with Vishnu Prasanna, a GM. Prasanna did something unorthodox with his young ward. He trained him without an engine watching over. “Started working with him in 2017,” Prasanna had told this daily when Gukesh reached the stratosphere after winning gold in Board One of the Olympiad in 2022. “He was strategic and had good positioning skills even then. He’s now much more aggressive than before. There’s been a huge change in his approach.”While players like Carlsen are intuitive, the Indian likes to take his time as he calculates moves. This is something that it works for him. The third GM was a formality and he also became the youngest from the country to achieve this feat.Even as the world shut down during Covid, Gukesh saw it as a rare opportunity to hone his skills. He spent more hours on the board. One year after the world returned to normalcy, he won an individual gold at the Olympiad in Chennai.One can argue that without the Olympiad, his development wouldn’t have been so rapid. If it was held anywhere else, India would have been eligible to field only one side. Because it was the home Olympiad, they could field the likes of Gukesh and Praggnanadhaa.The year 2023 saw another high before a worrying dip. In August, Gukesh overtook Anand to become India’s leading player by ranking, before form deserted him. He had almost given up but took part in Chennai Grand Masters where he won to secure a spot in the Candidates. The rest, as they say, is history.
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