After meeting Viswanathan Anand at an early age, D Gukesh would go on to join five-time world champion and former No 1’s chess academy as one of its first pupils. Eventually he would go on to surpass his idol and mentor to become the highest-ranked Indian chess player.
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Reigning world champion Gukesh Dommaraju opened up on the first time he met Indian chess legend Viswanathan Anand, whom he considers his idol and ‘Guru’. Gukesh is part of
Indian’s golden generation of chess stars that also comprises Arjun Erigaisi, R Praggnanandhaa among others, and five-time world champion.
And former world No 1
Anand has played a major role in shaping this group of world-class players, who had starred in India’s historic golden sweep at the Chess Olympiad last year and have also shone in a number of other major events.
Gukesh reveals ‘cool moment’ when he first met ‘Vishy sir’
“The first time I met Vishy sir was, met maybe a strong word, but he had come to my school, and I was one of the students, who kind of welcomed him or something like that. That was a cool moment,” Gukesh, who had studied at the Velammal Vidyalaya in Chennai, said in a video posted by Freestyle Chess.
Gukesh was among the first batch of players, along with Praggnanandhaa and his sister R Vaishali, to join the WestBridge Anand Chess Academy (WACA), the Soviet-style chess academy founded by Anand in December 2020. Under Anand’s tutelage, the 18-year-old Grandmaster would go on to chart a meteoric rise in the sport and become
Gukesh would go on to surpass his mentor, ending Anand’s 37-year reign as the top-ranked Indian chess player in August 2023. The year 2024 would prove to be even more special for him as he would become the youngest champion in the history of the Candidates Tournament, star in India’s Olympiad triumph in Budapest.
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He would then fulfill a lifelong dream by
defeating Chinese GM Ding Liren in Singapore in December, becoming only the second Indian after Anand to be crowned world champion.
More recently, Gukesh finished runner-up at the Tata Steel Chess tournament in Wijk aan Zee, Netherlands followed by an underwhelming run in the opening event of the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour in Weissenhaus, Germany.