Dommaraju Gukesh and India’s chess comeback
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. It isn’t often that an Indian athlete prevails over a Chinese competitor, but that happened last week in Singapore. Eighteen-year-old Indian grandmaster Dommaraju Gukesh became the youngest-ever undisputed world chess champion by defeating 32-year-old Ding Liren of China in the final game of a 14-game championship.
For those who know the difference between a Queen’s Gambit and a Sicilian Defense, Mr. Gukesh’s victory is no big surprise. In recent years, India has dramatically improved its standing in world chess.
Before 1987 India didn’t have a single grandmaster—the highest echelon in chess. Now the country boasts four of the world’s top 20 players and 85 grandmasters. That is fewer grandmasters than Russia or the U.S.
have produced, but it’s more than China. In India, “there’s now more strength at the top than before," says Susan Ninan, a sports writer who has written extensively about chess in India, in an email interview. The International Chess Federation ranks India as the world’s second-strongest team, behind the U.S.
In April Mr. Gukesh won a tournament against strong contenders in Toronto, earning the right to challenge Mr. Ding for the world title.
Former world chess champion Garry Kasparov tweeted that the “Indian earthquake in Toronto is the culmination of the shifting tectonic plates in the chess world." Commentators sometimes view chess through a geopolitical prism. The 1972 world championship in Reykjavík, Iceland, in which American Bobby Fischer dethroned the Soviet Union’s Boris Spassky, was widely framed as a contest between the rival superpowers. Geopolitical trends are still reflected in chess today—the rise of India, the China-India rivalry, the relative decline of
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