Gukesh Debuts in Google News

For the past few weeks I've been running a series on the early career of Gukesh Dommaraju, aka Gukesh D. The two most recent posts were:-

• Gukesh in 2018 - Age 12 (29 November 2024), and
• Gukesh in 2018 - Scores & Rating (06 December 2024)

That second post ended,

In the first event on the 2018 list, he was rated 2362; in the last event, he was rated 2466. He started the year with a CM title and ended as an IM. In a few more months, he would earn the GM title.

With a bit of luck, I discovered more info about the IM/GM titles. Along with my monthly in-depth look at Google News, last seen in World Championship Yahoos 2024 (November 2024), I receive a daily report of chess news under the title 'Google Alert - Daily Digest'. This week I ran a search for references to Gukesh in my Google Alert archive -- it goes back to 2012 -- and was pleased to find a few news articles covering the GM's early career. The earliest was:-

• 2018-03-13: Gukesh making all the right moves (timesofindia.indiatimes.com) • 'To say that 11-year-old newly-crowned International Master Gukesh breathes chess will be an understatement. Even as children of his age are busy cramming up school syllabus, Gukesh is charting his next move on the chess board. Having taken to the game in 2013, Gukesh is today one of the many prominent players to have emerged out of the city. Gukesh, who became India's latest IM at the conclusion of the 34th Open de Cappelle la Grande chess tournament in France, took to the sport in 2013.'

The first 'Gukesh in 2018' post listed the French tournament with relevant TWIC info:-

TWIC 1218 • 34th Cappelle Open 2018; Sat 3rd Mar 2018; Sat 10th Mar 2018; Cappelle la Grande; FRA; 9 Rounds; Swiss; Time Control: 90m:30m+30spm(1) • 7.0-2.0; 2360

The next two 'Google Alert' mentions of Gukesh were:-

• 2019-01-16: Gukesh Becomes 2nd Youngest Chess Grandmaster In History (chess.com; IM Rakesh) • 'At the age of 12 years, 7 months, and 17 days, Indian prodigy Gukesh Dommaraju became the second youngest grandmaster in chess history. He scored his third grandmaster norm at the 17th Delhi International Chess Grandmaster Open today in New Delhi, India. Despite the recent torrid tournament schedule for Gukesh, the world record of Sergey Karjakin still narrowly stands, this time by just 17 days!', and
  
  
• 2020-04-07: Coronavirus lockdown: Teen chess wizards keep composure; stay busy with online events (deccanherald.com) • 'Young they might be but restless? Certainly not. R Praggnanandhaa, D Gukesh and P Iniyan -- the teen brigade of Indian chess is unfazed about being confined to home due to the national lockdown to contain the spread of coronavirus [...]'

Then follows a pause of more than two years, undoubtedly due to the various covid-19 lockdowns in effect all over the world.

• 2022-08-05: India's teen talent shines as Chennai Olympiad breaks records (theguardian.com; Leonard Barden) • 'The standout first half Olympiad team has been India 2, with its average age of 19 and its already iconic top board Gukesh D (as he is now invariably called rather than Dommaraju Gukesh). The 16-year-old son of a surgeon and a microbiologist has come a long way from when, at 11, he incurred Nigel Short's displeasure.' [NB: for letting Short's clock run when the GM failed to punch it]

The Barden article continued,

Gukesh has been in stellar form in 2022, winning five first prizes in succession in Spain. His rating has shot past the elite 2700 mark, a feat achieved at a younger age by only Wei Yi, Magnus Carlsen and Alireza Firouzja. He has won all his seven games so far in Chennai, including his impressive win over Alexey Shirov where he encouraged the former world title challenger to launch one of his Fire on Board attacks so as to refute it by superior strategic and endgame play.

Gukesh is making a vast impression in Chennai, one that can be compared with five of the great Olympiad debuts by future world class players: Paul Keres at Warsaw 1935, Bent Larsen at Moscow 1956, Mikhail Tal at Munich 1958, Judit Polgar at Thessaloniki 1988, and Vlad Kramnik at Manila 1992.'

At every milestone in his meteoric career, Gukesh compared favorably to the greatest of the chess greats. It's little wonder that he became the youngest World Champion of all time.

December 1974 & 1999 'On the Cover'

What do the Chess Life issues of December 1974 and December 1999 have in common? Yes, they are obviously the next in the 'On the Cover' series last seen in November 1974 & 1999 'On the Cover' (November 2024). On top of that, they were both dominated by rating lists.

Left: '?' (also 'Special Yearbook Issue!')
Right: '1999... 2000... and still going strong!'

Chess Life & Review (50 Years Ago)

Anatoly Karpov: if he beats Korchnoi, and if Fischer and FIDE cannot resolve their differences, he will be World Champion in 1975. Match games continue [inside].

Karpov's previous cover appearance was May 1974 & 1999 'On the Cover' (May 2024; 'Anatoly Karpov and Tigran Petrosian, winners of their quarterfinal candidates matches.') Everyone who knows anything about modern chess history knows what happened in 1975. I suppose we'll see the story unfold in next year's 'On the Cover' posts.

The December 1974 CL&R was 108 pages. Of those, 70 were allocated to the '1975 USCF Yearbook', and of those, 52 were allocated to the rating list. The Karpov - Korchnoi match, the inspiration for the cover, was a single page, with only raw game scores for games 11-21.

Chess Life (25 Years Ago)

No, we will not enter into the argument as to when the millennium arrives. We do knows that the end of December 31, 1999, will usher in a new year. Appropriately, the babe (2000) is playing the decisive Rg7+ against the old man (1999). The artist, Jose Angel Pardo, of Orlando, Florida, notes "That was the winning move I played in the first game I was ever able to beat my father."

Whether you consider it to be the millennium or just the beginning of a new year, one thing is clear: Chess is still going strong. Of our 86,000 members, fully 74,000 played at least one rated game of chess between October 1998 and October 1999. We've separated the Annual Rating List from the rest of the magazine and included a few items we hope you will find useful throughout the new year. And that includes a comprehensive listing of all changes to the Official Rules of Chess, 4th Edition.

Again we see a rating list. Of the 128 pages in the December 1999 CL, 49 were allocated to the list. Interspersed throughout the list were a number of interviews by Jerry Hanken, including one with 13-year old Lawrence Trent for the World Open and another with 8-year old David Howell. The same Howell, now a GM, commentated for FIDE on the recent World Championship match between Ding Liren and Gukesh.

There was more to the 'On the Cover' introduction for the same December CL. It continued,

Transition is never easy or particularly palatable for many. The Executive Board, in closed session, passed an enigmatic resolution to terminate the contract of Michael Cavallo as our Executive Director. I say enigmatic not as a judgement as much as a statement of fact.

After four paragraphs on the same subject I still didn't have a clue why this was newsworthy for the general CL readership. There is a ton of relevant information in the rgcp archive at groups.google.com, e.g. search?q=Cavallo, but who has the time to plow through it? For a previous cover illustration by Jose Angel Pardo, see September 1974 & 1999 'On the Cover' (September 2024).

Working with Gukesh 'A Fascinating Journey'

In this series of monthly posts featuring a video, we've seen Youtube's ChessBase India channel (CBI) many times, most recently in The London Chess Centre on Video (October 2024). This month's video is a collaboration between CBI and Youtube's Paddy Upton channel, where it lives.

Who is Paddy Upton? Wikipedia's page Paddy Upton (wikipedia.org) informs,

Patrick Anthony Howard 'Paddy' Upton (born 5 November 1968) is a South African born cricket coach specialising as head coach in professional Twenty20 cricket, mental coach to professional athletes, sports scientist executive coach and professor of practice at Deakin University.

What do cricket and chess have in common? The following clip answers that question and many others.

How I'm Coaching Gukesh D for the World Chess Championship (32:13) • '[Published on] Nov 19, 2024'

The video's description said,

In this interview with @ChessBaseIndiachannel, I share my experience working with Indian chess sensation Gukesh D as he prepares for the World Chess Championship. Having worked with world-class athletes across 20+ sports, from legends like Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, and Virat Kohli to the Indian Men's Hockey team at the 2024 Olympic Games. Stepping into the world of chess has been a fascinating journey.

The description continued,

In this video, I [Paddy Upton] discuss:
* Why Gukesh stands out as one of the smartest, most self-aware athletes I’ve worked with.
* How "big match temperament" enables athletes to thrive under pressure.
* The importance of focusing on the process rather than the result.
* How universal principles of mental conditioning apply across all sports.
* Lessons from life and spirituality that help athletes stay grounded and perform their best.

I've always been somewhat skeptical whenever I hear someone say, 'Chess is a sport'. After watching this video, I'm less skeptical.

Gukesh in 2018 (Scores & Rating)

In last week's post, Gukesh in 2018 - Age 12 (November 2024), about the early career of the new World Champion Gukesh Dommaraju, I neglected to record the young prodigy's score and rating for the 17 events in the list. For this current post, I corrected the oversight.

It's worth explaining why six of the events are still missing the final score. These are events where a result was reported by TWIC on two consecutive weeks (a partial result, then the complete result), and where Gukesh was listed in the first report, but not in the second. This is because his final score was less than TWIC's cutoff to limit the number of players in the report (TWIC often lists only the top players when reporting on large tournaments, especially those using Swiss pairing systems).

It's entirely possible that Gukesh played in events where he was not listed in TWIC, because he finished lower than TWIC's cutoff. In those events, he would not appear on my initial search for events where he played.

Over the 17 tournaments, he played more than 150 games. In the first event on the 2018 list, he was rated 2362; in the last event, he was rated 2466. He started the year with a CM title and ended as an IM. In a few more months, he would earn the GM title.

World Class Asian Players

The previous post in the weekly AI comics series investigated the burning question Why Are 'Comics' Rarely Funny? (November 2024). This post explores the World Championship match currently being played in Singapore, last seen on this blog in World Championship Yahoos 2024 (November 2024).

'Ding Liren and Gukesh play chess in Singapore.'
AI Comic Factory

Not very good is it? Although there are two Asian players, one of them maybe Chinese, there is nothing obviously related to Singapore. I tried a number of different styles -- Franco-Belgian, Modern American, ... -- and they all had the same flaws. Some of them showed two (probably) Chinese players in each of the four panels.

What went wrong? I suspect that the source dataset used to generate the images is older than the emergence of Gukesh as a recognizable name in chess, i.e. there are not many images of him. I also suspect that the keyword 'Singapore' might have skewed the software to over-represent Chinese players. I know the software understands the characteristics of (Asian sub-continent) Indians. See, for example, Real Chess Villages (March 2024).

For my first experiment on the name to face recognition of World Champions, see Rogues' Gallery (December 2023). There I wrote,

The following composite image is assembled from 18 times '[Name] plays chess', where '[Name]' is one of the World Champions.

In that image the likeness of Ding Liren is acceptable, if only so-so. It is better than some of the other, historical World Champions, which is not setting the bar very high. Maybe I'll come back to this in a future post, but there are other fish to fry in AI comics.

Lasker's Future Community

We don't often see books for the monthly post in the long-running series on Top eBay Chess Items by Price (March 2010). The visuals are seldom attractive and the narrative is rarely compelling.

Although I had plenty of more attractive choices on this month's short list, I have a soft spot for the second World Champion. Titled, '1940 SIGNED by Emanuel LASKER INSCRIBED to Lotte JACOBI Society Chess Book RARE', the Lasker book pictured below sold for $850.00, 'Buy It Now'.

The description was written by someone who knows the item well.

'The Community of the Future' by Emanuel Lasker M.J. Bernin, Publisher. New York. 1940. 1st Edition. Signed. Inscribed.

5 1/2 x 7 3/4 inches. Hardcover. 1-295, [1] pp. Very good. Spine faded. Some wear, minor loss to spine along back gutter at the head. Internally near fine; clean, tight, unmarked. Signed/inscribed by Lasker in ink on front free endpaper’s verso: “Lotte Jacobi with kind greetings. Emanuel Lasker. June 7th, 40.” Nice and attractive.

The last book by Emanuel Lasker (1868-1941), a German chess player, mathematician, and philosopher who was World Chess Champion for 27 years, from 1894 to 1921, the longest reign of any officially recognized World Chess Champion in history. In 'The Community of the Future' Lasker is proposing solutions for serious political problems, including anti-Semitism and unemployment.

Inscribed to Lotte Jacobi (1896-1990), a leading American portrait photographer and photojournalist, known for her high-contrast black-and-white portrait photography, characterized by intimate, sometimes dramatic, sometimes idiosyncratic and often definitive humanist depictions of both ordinary people in the United States and Europe and some of the most important artists, thinkers and activists of the 20th century.

For a previous eBay 'Top Item by Price' featuring a Lasker book, see Lasker's Manual Autographed (March 2017).

Gukesh in 2018 (age 12)

In the previous post on the early career of Gukesh Dommaraju, Gukesh Debuts in a WCC Cycle and in TWIC (November 2024), I listed a half-dozen tournaments played through the end of 2017. Here's the continuation of that list:-

• TWIC 1208 • Bhopal International Open; Thu 21st Dec 2017; Thu 28th Dec 2017; Bhopal; IND; 10 Rounds; Swiss; Time Control: 90m+30spm(1) • 8.0-2.0; 2362
• TWIC 1208[/-09] • 3rd IIFL Wealth Mumbai Op; Sat 30th Dec 2017; Sun 7th Jan 2018; Mumbai; IND; 9 Rounds; Swiss; Time Control: 90m:30m+30spm(1) • ? [<6.0-3.0]; 2362
• TWIC 1210[/-11] • 16th Delhi Open 2018; Tue 9th Jan 2018; Tue 16th Jan 2018; New Delhi; IND; 10 Rounds; Swiss; Time Control: 90m+30spm(1) • ? [<6.5-3.5]; 2354
• TWIC 1212[/-13] • 14th Moscow Open A 2018; Thu 25th Jan 2018; Mon 5th Feb 2018; Moscow; RUS; 9 Rounds; Swiss; Time Control: 90m:30m+30spm(1) • ? [<6.0-3.0]; 2354
• TWIC 1218 • 34th Cappelle Open 2018; Sat 3rd Mar 2018; Sat 10th Mar 2018; Cappelle la Grande; FRA; 9 Rounds; Swiss; Time Control: 90m:30m+30spm(1) • 7.0-2.0; 2360
• TWIC 1224 • 18th BCC Open 2018; Fri 13th Apr 2018; Sat 21st Apr 2018; Cha-Am; THA; 9 Rounds; Swiss; Time Control: 90m:30m+30spm(1) • 7.0-2.0; 2401
• TWIC 1229 • 3rd Kolkata GM Open 2018; Mon 14th May 2018; Tue 22nd May 2018; Kolkata; IND; 9 Rounds; Swiss; Time Control: 90m+30spm(1) • 6.0-3.0; 2426
• TWIC 1229[/-30] • 11th KIIT Elite Open 2018; Fri 25th May 2018; Fri 1st Jun 2018; Bhubaneswar; IND; 10 Rounds; Swiss; Time Control: 90m+30spm(1) • ? [<6.5-3.5]; 2426
• TWIC 1232[/-33] • 22nd Voronezh Master Open; Tue 12th Jun 2018; Thu 21st Jun 2018; Voronezh; RUS; 9 Rounds; Swiss; Time Control: 90m:30m+30spm(1) • ? [<5.5-3.5]; 2431
• TWIC 1236 • 11th Paracin Summer Open; Fri 6th Jul 2018; Fri 13th Jul 2018; Paracin; SRB; 9 Rounds; Swiss; Time Control: 90m+30spm(1) • 5.5-3.5; 2433
• TWIC 1238 • 29th Czech Open A 2018; Thu 12th Jul 2018; Sun 29th Jul 2018; Pardubice; CZE; 9 Rounds; Swiss; Time Control: 90m:30m+30spm(1) • 6.0-3.0; 2433; [see also rapid event]
• TWIC 1241[/-42] • 20th Sants Open 2018; Fri 17th Aug 2018; Sun 26th Aug 2018; Barcelona; ESP; 10 Rounds; Swiss; Time Control: 90m:30m+30spm(1) • ? [<7.0-3.0]; 2440
• TWIC 1244 • 20th Trieste Open 2018; Sat 1st Sep 2018; Sat 8th Sep 2018; Trieste; ITA; 9 Rounds; Swiss; Time Control: 90m:30m+30spm(1) • 6.0-3.0; 2453
• TWIC 1246 • Anogia GM/IM-norm 2018 [NB: 5th Fischer Mem GM 2018]; Tue 11th Sep 2018; Wed 19th Sep 2018; Anogia; GRE; 10 Players.; 9 Rounds; SRR; Time Control: 90m:30m+30spm(1) • 5.0-4.0 [+3-2=4]; 2453
• TWIC 1249 • 1st Gujarat Open 2018; Fri 5th Oct 2018; Fri 12th Oct 2018; Ahmedabad; IND; 9 Rounds; Swiss; Time Control: 90m+30spm(1) • 7.0-2.0; 2456
• TWIC 1257 • Orbis 2 GM 2018; Mon 3rd Dec 2018; Sun 9th Dec 2018; Paracin; SRB; 10 Players; 9 Rounds; SRR Time Control: 90m+30spm(1) • 7.5-1.5 [+6-0=3]; 2466
• TWIC 1259 • Sunway Sitges Open 2018; Fri 14th Dec 2018; Sun 23rd Dec 2018; Sitges; ESP; 10 Rounds; Swiss; Time Control: 90m+30spm(1) • 6.5-3.5; 2466

There's at least one important tournament missing from that list. I'll cover it in my next post in the series.