World Chess Cup: Dean is revived, shines and knocks down Gukesh with black in the first round of the World Chess Cup | Sport
“I’m afraid that (Lizhen) Ding is broken forever,” Norway’s Magnus Carlsen, who remains the leader, said in April. number one chess, despite giving up the world title. And just two days ago he emphasized his pessimism about the reigning champion: “This duel could turn into a bloodbath.” But the first game of fourteen planned in Singapore – with a prize fund of 2.4 million euros – turned out exactly the opposite: the Chinese, sick, depressed and in bad shape for a year and a half, beat the Indian Dommaraju Gukesh with black. , 18, is the youngest candidate in history to lose a beloved network role in just four and a half hours.
“This is my first victory in a long time,” was the first thing Dean said when meeting with reporters. And so much: he has not won a single game since January 27 against the Dutchman Max Warmerdam in the penultimate round of the Tata tournament in Wijk aan Zee (Netherlands), where he won only one more victory, namely over Gukesch. And after expressing his relief with this phrase, he said another very important phrase about his state of mind and serious problems with falling asleep since becoming world champion after exhausting efforts: “Today I tried to get some sleep before the game, but I couldn’t “
When this newspaper asked both of them to analyze the game on an emotional level, Dean revealed a very important fact: “I stayed in my chair throughout the game to maintain maximum concentration. This is exactly the opposite of the mistake I made at the previous World Championships (against Russian Ian Nepomnyashi) when I kept getting up. I organized myself so that I wasn’t too hungry or thirsty during the day, and that was key. Moreover, I admit that two months ago I performed poorly at the Chess Olympiad, but two months is a long time, and now I feel much better.”
Gukesh, as always, showed no emotion and threw away the balls: “Today’s outcome is due to a tactical error on my part. There is great mourning ahead. Either way, I set myself up to expect the best version of Dean, and that’s what I saw today.”
The game began with the perfect guest of honor: Briton Demis Hassabis, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry a month ago for deciphering the structure of 200 million proteins, one of the greatest achievements in the history of biology. A chess prodigy born to a Singaporean mother who is the CEO of Google-owned Deep Mind, which is one of the sponsors of the World Cup, Hassabis owes this scientific feat in large part to chess, since proteins are made up of amino acids, the number of possible combinations of which is enormous, as and the number of possible games in chess (one followed by 123 zeros) and in Go, an even more tactically complex Asian game (one followed by 700 zeros). The AlphaFold program created by Hassabis and his team for protein research is a spin-off of the AlphaZero and AlphaGo programs, which previously achieved great success in chess and Go.
So the latest revolutionary advances, for example in the field of liver cancer or antidepressants, are largely related to sports, where Dean and Gukesh are virtuosos. But there’s a big difference: AlphaZero doesn’t have feelings, but human chess players do. It is very difficult to determine exactly what the face of Gukesh, the youngest world title challenger in history, looked like at the start of the first round of the fight: his hieratic face, an indicator of a striking character at 18, has very little expression.
On the contrary, Dean’s trembling face and the enormous amount of time he spent on very logical games was an open book, considering that since he became world champion (May 2023), he has played well below his level and that he was on medication to be able to sleep. The Chinese tried to surprise the Indian with the French defense he had used in just a couple of games since 2012; As he later admitted, he did this on the recommendation of his chief analyst, Hungarian Richard Rapport, a great expert in this area. But Gukesh reacted very quickly, as if he had planned it – and he implied it at the press conference – or perhaps showed a straight face to impress the champion, when in fact he was surprised.
Objectively, Dean’s choice turned out to be good, if you just look at the board: his position after the first 16 moves was very reasonable. But this has already taken more than 75 minutes (of the two hours that everyone has to reach the 40th move). The concern was visible on her face and on the face of her mother, who sat in the second row of invited spectators, right in the center, in front of the board, although her son could not see her due to the glass separating the stage (soundproofing) the seats are opaque to avoid fraud with public. Gukesh’s father, who is also his representative, did not show up and was most likely following the game on the Internet.
At that moment, something important happened: Gukesh spent 33 minutes making a fairly simple decision: he was uncomfortable. And Dean quickly responded with a bold maneuver, since it involved an attack with the king in the center without castling. Suddenly Gukesh’s face was no longer iron and expressed doubt and fear. The clock became even, and just at that moment the Chinese gave something like an order: he moved the queen very far from the king, apparently to take the pawn.
Gukesh picked up his glove and attacked on the opposite flank, but then Dean surprised him again: instead of accepting a pawn as a gift, he proposed an exchange of queens, reducing White’s attack. The Indian escaped this, but his cure was worse than the disease: Dean, looking increasingly like he could conquer the world, took a very harmonious position, while his rival’s whites floated in chaos. The prospect of a Chinese victory in the first round with black, which seemed almost impossible, became a logical outcome.
Whoever visited the spectators’ room at that moment saw a completely unexpected scene: the back of Gukesh’s chair began to tremble, reflecting his nervous pedaling. Dean’s mother left. Suddenly, Viswanathan Anand, five-time world champion and India’s national idol, arrived with a face that showed his dolphin on the edge of the abyss.
However, Dean, still unsure of himself after a year and a half of physical and mental testing, made an inaccuracy that gave his opponent a very good opportunity to counterattack. But he did not see it, confirming that the astonishing reality completely blindsided him: he had arrived in Singapore as the overwhelming favorite and found himself on the brink.
The rest was a piece of cake for the champion, rising from the ashes, while the candidate closed his eyes in disbelief shortly before giving up. Artificial intelligence will likely achieve – when quantum computers exist – machines capable of playing perfect chess, which has provided a magnificent field for scientific experimentation from Alan Turing (circa 1947) to Nobel laureate Hassabis, including Gary’s historic defeat by Kasparov. Deep Blue (IBM) in 1997. But he will never be able to create such exciting and emotional fights as the one that took place this Monday in Singapore.