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Ashta’s chess tales

The boy who would not wait

Chennai and Singapore, 2024 · 2 minute read

At eighteen he became the youngest world chess champion there has ever been.

Gukesh Dommaraju grew up in Chennai, in southern India — the same city as Viswanathan Anand, who in 1988 became India’s first grandmaster and went on to be world champion five times.

Gukesh learned chess at seven. Like every player before him, he started with the smallest things: the names of the squares, how each piece moves, how to checkmate with a queen. He became a grandmaster at twelve.

When he was eleven, someone asked him on camera what he wanted. He said he wanted to be the youngest world champion.

In December 2024, in Singapore, he played a match for that title against the champion, Ding Liren of China. It was fourteen games long and it was level going into the last one. In the final game, in a position that looked like a draw, Ding made one mistake. Gukesh saw it.

He won the match by seven and a half points to six and a half. He was eighteen years old — four years younger than the previous record, which had stood for almost forty years.

He sat at the board afterwards and put every piece back on its starting square before he left.

Every champion you will ever read about began where you are beginning: learning the names of sixty-four squares.