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Gukesh looks beyond chess ahead of World Championship match
Perhaps the challenge for the 20-year-old this time is not just to find his best chess again, but to rediscover the joy of playing it.
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Less than a month to the World Chess Championship match, and world champion D Gukesh seems to be horsing around.
Quite literally.
The 20-year-old is in on the joke. In his latest social media post, he was seen on horseback in a field, with the cheeky caption: “They said work on your knight play… instructions unclear.”
Last week, he was at the movies with fellow Indian chess stars Praggnanandhaa and Vaishali, watching the latest Rajinikanth film, Jailer 2 where chess makes an appearance. In a now-viral video, they're seen laughing their heads off over a character’s comically spectacular disregard for the rules of the game with unshakeable confidence - "Yaanaiya eduthomma, raajava adichomma, game-a mudichomma." (Take the rook, knock out the king and finish the game)
It can seem unusual in the lead-up to the match. The history of the World Chess Championship though is dotted with curious ways in which players have prepared for their biggest battles.
Ahead of his 1972 World Championship match against Boris Spassky, Bobby Fischer spent seven months training at Grossinger’s, a resort in New York’s Catskill mountains popular with professional boxers. His daily routine included swimming, tennis, weightlifting, skipping rope, cycling on an exercise bike, sit-ups and punching a 300-pound bag. Spassky, meanwhile, retreated to a country house outside Moscow with his team – running, swimming, doing yoga and daily sessions with a chess-playing psychologist.
Four decades ago, Garry Kasparov was running barefoot along beaches, swimming in the sea and playing football ahead of his match against Anatoly Karpov. By 1990, his match preparations had become an elaborate operation in Spain, where his mornings began in the swimming pool and breakfasts came with generous helpings of caviar.
Roughly a week before his 2010 World Championship match against Veselin Topalov, Viswanathan Anand had gone down a reading rabbit hole about the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun. A volcanic eruption in Iceland had thrown his travel plans into disarray, leaving his wife Aruna and his team of seconds scrambling to find a way to reach Sofia, the Bulgarian capital, in time for the match.
Before his match against Anand in 2013 in Chennai, Magnus Carlsen spent two weeks in Muscat, preparing for the match, playing ball games outdoors, swimming in the Gulf of Oman and soaking up the sun – partly an exercise in acclimatising to the Chennai heat.
Fabiano Caruana jogged, shot hoops, played tennis, practised yoga and swam in the Mediterranean ahead of his 2018 match against Carlsen while Nepomniachtchi underwent intensive chess preparation and physical conditioning and reportedly lost around 10kg ahead of his 2021 face-off against Carlsen in Dubai.
Looking back on his defeat in that match, Nepomniachtchi regretted spending his final weeks in Dubai hunched over a laptop. “I never let an extra rest day happen before the match with Magnus,” he said in a 2023 Chess.com interview. “In the last two or three weeks in Dubai, when I was supposed to go to the beach and swim, drink cocktails, and so on to gather some extra energy and recharge my battery, I was mostly sitting with my laptop and polishing some lines…maybe it’s not such a brilliant strategy to work too much.”
Gukesh learnt the value of switching off during his first World Championship in 2024. After Game 10 against Ding Liren, with the match deadlocked and doubts beginning to creep in, Gukesh’s coach Grzegorz Gajewski decided that another session of chess wasn't what the teenager needed on the rest day. Instead, they played squash and headed to the beach. The idea was simple: to forget about chess for a few hours.
Gukesh’s opponent for the November 24-December 12 World Championship match in Geneva, Javokhir Sindarov, is still wrapping up his tournament commitments. The 20-year-old Uzbek will compete in the four-player rapid event, 2026 Clutch Chess: Champions Showdown, in Missouri, USA, this week. “The thing with Rapid and Blitz is I enjoy it, it doesn’t take up energy and I don’t feel pressure,” Sindarov told HT in an earlier interview.
Gukesh, who has been struggling with his form for a while now, made his final pre-match tournament appearance at the Fide Chess Olympiad in September. He opted to play on Board 4, danced with rare abandon at the Bermuda Party and finished with a silver medal.
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In an interview with HT in June, after the Norway Chess tournament where he finished dead last, Gukesh, seemingly weighed down by poor results and the burden of expectations, spoke about finding it a “challenge to enjoy chess” and the need to “manage himself better.” He sounded vulnerable, dispirited, emotionally worn down and perhaps a little broken. But that’s how the light gets in, Leonard Cohen might have argued. The good thing, perhaps, was that after the gut-punching lows he had endured, there was nowhere to go but up.
He has been through the wringer of World Championship match before. He knows that over 14 games, the battle is as much in the mind as on the board.
There is the weight of a title to defend, the scrutiny that comes with being world champion and the exhausting business of having to turn up, day after day, with a clear head, and play the same opponent. Perhaps the challenge for Gukesh this time is not just to find his best chess again, but to rediscover the joy of playing it.
A little horsing around is perhaps what Gukesh feels he needs.
