After Magnus Carlsen, Chess Has Entered a New Age

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 275src, 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 2src24, 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.