D Gukesh's coach comes to his defence after winless run in Freestyle Chess Weissenhaus: 'It's not that simple'

Gukesh Dommaraju had a forgettable run in the opening event of the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour in Weissenhaus, Germany, finishing 8th in the 10-player event after failing to win a single game across eight days of competition . The 18-year-old, who had become the youngest world champion in chess history in December and nearly won the Tata Steel Chess tournament earlier this month, drew 11 games and lost six, including against world No 1 Magnus Carlsen in the round-robin stage.

Gukesh’s coach Grzegorz Gajewski however, came to his defence after his underwhelming campaign ended with a defeat in 30 moves against Alireza Firouzja on Friday.

American Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura had recently stated that Gukesh’s intuition, especially when faced with a time crunch, was his “biggest weakness”. Gajewski, however, responded to Nakamura’s statement that Gukesh needed to work on his intuition, but only in the format that he had struggled in this past week.

“In 960, calculation can be very misleading because you have to be careful about which moves you are calculating.

“So, yes, he needs to improve his intuition. but by intuition I mean Chess960 intuition. Because many moves that intuitively seem fine in classical chess are just pure mistakes in 960,” the Polish GM said in response to a question on a live stream conducted by ChessBase India.

Gajewski went on to state that adapting to the unpredictable format that is Chess960 will take some time as it has no “history” or “literature” like the Classical format.

“I think it’s the biggest challenge for 960. It’s like we have no history here. There’s no literature. Chess, normal chess had been developing for centuries. And here we need to fast track this, with engine. And that’s, it’s not that simple,” Gajewski added.

Being the reigning world champion, Gukesh is an automatic qualifier for all events in the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour, and thus will get the opportunity to bounce back in the next event, which will be taking place in Paris in April.

Gukesh, however, won’t be the only Indian in action at the Paris leg of the Tour, as world No 5 Arjun Erigaisi has also been confirmed for the event .

And Freestyle Chess, Gukesh will be looking forward to Norway Chess – where he be coming face to face with five-time world champion Carlsen – as well as the Chess World Cup that will be taking place in India later this year.