 "Despite struggling in Freestyle Chess, Classical world champion D Gukesh has had his moments in the unpredictable format. Image credit: Norway Chess")
Therer is little doubt over Gukesh Dommaraju’s credentials as a Classical player, given the 19-year-old chess star is the reigning as well as the youngest world champion in the format and is currently ranked fifth in the world.
The Indian Grandmaster, however, doesn’t quite have the same aura in faster formats such as rapid and blitz as he does in Standard chess. And when it comes to the unpredictable format that is Freestyle Chess, Gukesh has had a forgettable run so far in the inaugural Grand Slam Tour.
Freestyle Chess, which also goes by the name Fischer Random or Chess960, is a format where the pieces on the first rank from a player’s perspective are randomly arranged before every game, and is revealed around 15 minutes before start of play.
Gukesh is someone who is known for his exceptional ability to calculate in the middle of a game, often going into a trance-like state while figuring out the next set of moves, and his style of play suits the longer Classical format more than anything else.
Gone in just nine moves
That said, the Chennai lad has had his moments in the Freestyle format as well. He had, after all, defeated popular chess streamer Levy Rozman, a.k.a. Gotham Chess, in just nine moves during a three-minute game in a recent Freestyle Friday tournament.
The layout of the board had the bishops standing at the a and the h files and the rooks and knights occupying similar-coloured squares on either side of the king and queen. Gukesh, whose name wasn’t revealed until the end of the game, started with an e4 opening, to which Rozman replied with an f5.
Gukesh took his e pawn a step further to the fifth rank, and Rozman decided to free up space on the left side of the board by moving his g pawn. It wasn’t long before the latter decided to step things up by advancing his queen (Qh5), to which the Indian teenager replied by having both of his knights gallop forward.
Rozman tried to activate his bishop stationed on the right corner of the board by moving his b pawn (b5), and also captured Gukesh’s h pawn. His opponent, however, pulled off a couple of well-timed punches of his own, moving his g pawn forward to clear the path for a bishop exchange.
Gukesh, however, ended the contest in one swift move – moving his knight to f4, thereby trapping Rozman’s queen at h2 with it as well as with a rook and a pawn.
“Holy! That’s crazy! My queen’s just trapped. Oh my God! Well I got slightly destroyed there. I can’t do anything,” Rozman said on the stream as he raised the white flag of surrender shortly after.
“I got destroyed by Gukesh!” he exclaimed later laughing after finding out who his opponent was.
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