Give your 4 minutes to Chess

It is 4 AM here in India, a quiet evening in Toronto, where the next challenger to the world champion is being decided through a tournament called Candidates, with 8 Men playing each other in a round-robin format.

This is the penultimate round, 17-year-old kid Gukesh has 4 min left on his clock, he has a winning advantage but he has to find the right combination of moves in the next 4 min to convert the advantage into a win and go into the final round leading the tournament.

Now I don’t have to be a grandmaster to know the moves, any broadcaster worth their salt was repeatedly shouting the moves into their mics in excitement, as calculated by the computers, in fact the moves were not even relevant to me at that point, the only thing that mattered was that the 17-year-old I was rooting for, will he be able to find the moves? All my amateur chess-watching/playing experience and commentators told me it wasn’t an easy combination to find, the position on the board is winning but fragile. It could all crumble with just one oversight.

Off the Board: What was in his mind? Gukesh was at the same place last week, against the same opponent, Alireza Firouja, and with similar time pressure. He chose the ultra-aggressive route that day and died by the sword.

He walked into the arena this afternoon with Indians in Canada cheering for him, he is aware there is an entire chess community back home who have been waiting for a second World Champion from India for more than a decade now, in fact, this territory has not been traversed by any other Indian before except for one legend, Vishy Anand. ?

Back to the board: I, along with the other hundred thousand watching the game live on one particular YouTube Channel, had their heart racing for those 4 minutes, I would like to believe. A game perceived as a slow, calm, old men's club game, had me clutching my chair’s armrest and intently looking at the screen waiting for the move. The camera zooms into Gukesh’s face and any AI face scan in the world would tell you that it represents the sweet cocktail of focus and calm. ?

Off the board: Before the tournament, in an interview, the former World Champion and arguably the greatest player in the Modern Era, Magnus Carlsen, had different predictions. He believed it was the best chance for World no. 2 Fabiano Caruana to win the world championship or for the World no. 3 Hikaru Nakamura. In the same breath, he predicted that Gukesh would have a tough tournament. Gukesh acknowledged in the post-tournament press conference that he was aware of the noise.

And mid-tournament, the chess world saw Gukesh signing a sponsorship deal (possibly multi crores) with good folks at Westbridge Capital.

Back to the board: It took me, Gukesh, and millions of others 4 hours to get here. I will admit, that I didn’t have my eyes on the game the entire time, I blame the current attention economy drivers around me for it, training my brain for 30-second focus spans for a reel or a short. Maybe this is the reason Chess has sometimes struggled to reach the masses, I wondered. I was also parallelly scribbling down data for my chess business research and found numerous YouTube channels broadcasting the game in multiple languages all across the world. I could derive that there are millions out there witnessing the same moment as me. I also took time off to practice rudiments on my drum pad, and to read 6 pages of a book I had been reading only to get back to the board at intervals. But I was hooked for long enough to get these 4 minutes.

And there was the moment when Gukesh swiftly moved his rook to capture an undefended pawn. A few moves later, His opponent Firouja known as one the trickiest young GMs, threw one final trick at Gukesh, but this time Gukesh didn’t need 4 minutes to navigate his way, he already saw it coming in the 4 minutes that he had used. Firouja resigned. ?

While everyone around congratulated Gukesh, he accepted and acknowledged it all with a straight face, no one saw him smile for the duration of the tournament. He meant business, he knew the job wasn’t done.

The next day, in the final round, he portrayed the composure of a monk to seal the deal. Sports reveal character, to me, Gukesh has the cold-blooded killer instinct of a gangster and the calm of a saint. A champion even before lifting the trophy.

This article is my attempt to invite more fans and sponsors to the game. Chess is not boring, it's not all intellectual, and you need not be a master to follow the story.

The next time, you happen to come across a chess game, just hop on, the broadcasters will help you with the moves and the context. This is just the beginning of the new exciting chess era with strong chess characters in the world arena looking towards India which has had 4 different players claiming India's no. 1 rank in the last 6 months. Praggnanandhaa, Vidit Gujrathi, Arjun Erigasi, Nihal Sarin, Divya Deshmukh, Vaishali, and many more are working their way towards Indian dominance in Chess.

When Gukesh was just 11 years of age, he expressed to Chessbase India's Sagar Shah in an interview "I want to become the youngest world champion". Today he stands as the youngest ever Candidates winner with a shot at the World Championship in Nov'24

LinkedIn tells me that this article is a 4-minute read, so if you have made it here, Thank you for your 4 minutes to chess.