Viswanathan Anand: Expect a tough struggle every day in the World Chess Championship final

I am excited about the upcoming World Chess Championship match in Singapore between Ding Liren and D. Gukesh. It has a lot of very interesting plots to it.

It is the first all-Asian title match in the history of the World Championship. I believe that a rivalry between India and China will be fascinating to watch. And this is a historic match, as Gukesh is the world’s youngest challenger of all time.

Now, at the age of 18, he also has the possibility of becoming the youngest World Champion. And I think the location in Singapore is also fantastic. It shows the heightened global interest in chess.

I expect a tough struggle every day in the 14-game match. The participants will be probing each other for weaknesses right from the beginning.

They both have quite combative styles. Gukesh is very aggressive, while Ding can be a bit more positional, though he is also capable of mixing up the struggle, as he showed in his World Title match last year against Ian Nepomniachtchi; he had displayed great resilience in coming back from setbacks several times. I think the match in Singapore will be fascinating from Game 1.

Gukesh has had a much better year. His performance was phenomenal on the top board for India in the Budapest Chess Olympiad. Ding has, of course, been in a crisis for a while, and I think this year he was trying to snap out of it but just hasn’t managed. Having said that, the World Championship is quite famous for people who have been in red-hot form in other events but then not being able to generate the same dynamic in the actual match.

Gukesh will have to fight for every point. He should be confident with his play but should not expect that the resistance will be lower. Ding will have a chance to motivate himself, and he showed in his match against Nepomniachtchi that he is quite tenacious. So I don’t think that the past results are themselves very indicative of anything.

Whether Ding will be able to recover from the slump of form is one of the question marks. I don’t know what to expect. He might try to settle in early in the match. I think it may be more appropriate for him to start fighting from Game 1 because of the short runway to get into the match.

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