In every sport, there is curiosity about who the best player is and chess is no exception. The individual World Championship matches in chess date back to the 18th century, though the official World Championship cycles began only in 1886. The format of the Championship has changed several times in the pursuit of determining who the strongest player is.

The match format makes the ‘home preparation’ a very important factor and we can say that very often the outcome of matches is decided by preparation, rather than the playing strength of the players. Most of the championship matches since Garry Kasparov vs Vladimir Kramnik in 2000 have been based on opening preparation.

In 2008, Viswanathan Anand brought in the ‘attack element’ in the Championships by playing sharper games. However, the success in these matches mainly revolved around better preparation.

Magnus Carlsen arrived on the scene and changed things a bit. Carlsen has a great combination of knowledge, imagination, strategy and tactics. He has a style of trying to win every game in every tournament. As a result, the championships since 2013 saw lesser dependence on opening preparation.

In the 2023 match, we saw a lot of one-sided games. Either Ian Nepomniachtchi crushed Ding Liren using his strategic skills or Ding tactically outplayed Nepomniachtchi.

In this aspect, the 2024 match seems to be unique. With both the players coming from the Orient, the games see more imagination and courage rather than the monotonous strategic play.

While Ding spends at least 30 minutes for the first few moves, Gukesh is playing very quickly in the opening. I see an influence of Vladimir Kramnik in his recent play. In my opinion, Gukesh is at his best when he uses his own ideas, builds a position himself and goes for an assault.

He seems to be facing problems in grasping positions after the opening phase. On the other hand, in the middlegame phase, Ding is seen to be succeeding and is holding his own with accurate and imaginative tactical play.

Ding seems to have a much simpler approach to chess. He tries to find a tactical solution to every problem, just like a chess engine. He puts obstacles in opponents’ plans while trying to implement his own with accurate tactics.

There seems to be a great change in Gukesh’s playing style. Gukesh is generally very creative and very direct and one who doesn’t give much time to the opponent for manoeuvring. And his moves are quite straightforward with regard to the activity of pieces. But as we see here on the very first day, he played a novelty g4, which is an engine-recommended move, but surely quite a non-human move, I must say. Because when you put the bishop on g2, almost everybody felt what the bishop was doing there. And as we see, his pieces after move 22 were so badly placed that Black was already dominating all the pieces in the first and second ranks. Black had a knight in the 7th rank, queen in the 6th rank, rook in the 5th rank. So, this invasion in the very first game seemed very unlike him, because he has a great sense of defence.

In the ninth game, when it was time to press the position and improve the knight position, he didn’t go for it. So opening is prepared, but the follow-up is not as per the needs of the opening or strategy of that particular position. He seems to be a fish out of water in some of the games. We have never seen this happen to Gukesh before. Somewhere I believe that trying to play someone else’s ideas is showing in the aimlessness of Gukesh’s pieces, who is otherwise very, very good at placing his pieces at the optimal positions.

Ding on the contrary knows that he is not going to get a good position from the opening and is trying to find his own solutions. In this match, Ding has shown more creativity. Gukesh, generally a player of very independent thinking, has not been the same. He has shown great accuracy in specific positions like in Game 3, but he has also let go of winning positions. This is also credit to Ding’s tenacity and excellent endgame skills.

Though it is very difficult to predict the outcome of this match, I still give a slight edge to Gukesh, maybe 55 % against 45.

The writer is India’s third Grandmaster and an Arjuna Awardee