When Gukesh Dommaraju was a small child growing up in Chennai, India, his parents wanted him to be an athlete. Tennis, they thought. But Gukesh was drawn to another tactical game: chess. He was one of millions of Indian children who grew up under the influence of Viswanathan Anand, whose five world-championship titles led to an explosion of interest across the country. When Gukesh was seven, he watched Magnus Carlsen, then twenty-two years old, defeat his hero, Anand, to become the new world champion. Gukesh dreamed of being the one to bring the title back to India. In the fourth grade, he won the under-nine Asia championships, which convinced his parents of his potential, and they made the sort of sacrifices that families of aspiring champions in any sport often make—especially in chess, a game in which early specialization can bring outsized rewards.
Gukesh’s training was unusual in certain respects. For one thing, his coach, the grand master Vishnu Prasanna, eschewed computer chess engines for young players. Almost alone among the new generation of top players, Gukesh did not start working with computers until after he became a grand master—at twelve years, seven months, and seven days, the second-youngest ever to achieve that rank.
It has been a long time since any human has stood a chance against a computer in chess. What that means, exactly, remains an ongoing debate. There are those who once thought that the superiority of machines would cause a crisis for chess—and for humanity. But the game has not only survived the rise of computers, its popularity has soared because of them. The internet has made the game more accessible than ever, and has created new opportunities for training at every level.
The effect of computers on the top ranks of the game has been different but no less profound. Grand masters typically spend countless hours studying and memorizing long sequences of moves suggested by computer programs. These days, when a player makes a novel move, it is usually studied and tested on computers ahead of time, and is often intended to force his competitor out of his own computer-aided preparation “and lure them, alone, into the deep, dark, forest,” as Jordan Himelfarb writes in his new book, “Interregnum: Inside the Grueling and Glamorous Battle to Become the Next King of Chess.”
Prasanna, Gukesh’s coach, wasn’t a Luddite. He simply believed that young chess players benefitted from the discipline of a more analog approach, and he wanted Gukesh to build his understanding of the game piece by piece, instead of working backward from the insights of a machine. And it seemed to work: Gukesh was rarely unnerved by a difficult position. Playing a flexible, countering style, he made steady progress, becoming the youngest player ever to surpass a rating of 2750, breaking a record previously held by Carlsen, arguably the greatest player in history. Gukesh’s calm at the board was buttressed by an unusual focus in his training, on psychology, alongside the more traditional tactical and strategic instruction. He shunned publicity, which he found draining, worked extensively with a mental coach, and meditated before his first moves. From a young age, he seemed to grasp that the deep, dark forest could be scary, particularly if you are carrying the weight of expectations from one’s family, one’s peers, and even one’s country.
Gukesh is a central figure in “Interregnum,” which follows several of the world’s top chess players from tournament to tournament during the course of 2024, as they vie to become the challenger to the defending world champion, then a thirty-two-year-old from China named Ding Liren. (The world championship is generally contested every two years.) Chess can seem abstruse and forbidding to the uninitiated, but Himelfarb’s account of it is as readable and comprehensible as any more familiar sports story—or, for that matter, any narrative in which a bunch of ambitious people pursue a single goal.
What stands out, in fact, is not Himelfarb’s illumination of the mechanics of chess but his insights regarding the psychologies of people. The ones he follows closely are so stamped by their differences that they become almost a full array of archetypes. (Almost—there are, notably, no women among the contenders.) There is the lamb-like dreamer, Wesley So, and the trollish Hikaru Nakamura, who believes that his unprecedented success as a streamer has secured him a greater legacy than any prestigious chess title would. Carlsen, whose continued presence in the chess world shadows the hunt for a new king, is aggressive in asserting his opinions. (In 2022, Carlsen announced that he would no longer contend for the world championship, but he participates in other tournaments, usually with faster time controls, and often wins.) The true feelings of Anish Giri, in contrast, are “obscured by a fog of irony.” Fabiano Caruana, a precise, brilliant American forever on the precipice of a world title, is described as a kind of “scientist,” while Ding, who plummeted into a depression after winning the world championship in 2023, has a sensitive, poetic soul.
Gukesh has a maturity that seems connected to his openness to instinctual play, and to his awareness of the depth and power of human feeling. He is also, in the end, the victor. The world championship between Ding and the young Indian comes down to a thrilling final game, when both players manage to find not only inner resources but also inspiration from each other. Eventually, Ding moves his bishop to a square where it can be trapped, and the game is over; Gukesh is the youngest outright world champion in history, the game’s new king.
Or is he? Although he had one brilliant win over Carlsen last year, at the Norway Chess tournament—one of Carlsen’s rare appearances in a classical chess tournament—Gukesh has otherwise played so badly in the aftermath of winning the title that he tumbled out of the world’s top ten. Meanwhile, a new enfant terrible has risen: Javokhir Sindarov, age twenty, who rampaged through the Candidates Tournament earlier this month with a record score, and will challenge Gukesh for the world title later this year.
There is something comforting, to me, about this churn of champions and challengers. Lately, it has been hard not to feel a little cynical, or even nihilistic, about the prospects of human beings in the age of A.I. Why play chess, if a computer always wins? Why write this column, if a large language model can do it? But stories like the one that Himelfarb tells are reminders that the thing we really care about is not the end result—a simple set of plays or sequence of words—but what happens in the hearts and minds of the people involved in them. The beauty of chess goes beyond logic; it includes desires, ideas, and feelings. That is the game’s difficulty, too. ♦