 "Hikaru Nakamura on D Gukesh vs Ding Liren World Championship match: 'Don't see any world where Gukesh doesn't win'")
American chess grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura believes India’s D Gukesh has everything in him to register a dominant victory over China’s Ding Liren at the World Championship match later this year. Gukesh is in the form of his life, having won the Candidates tournament in April and most recently, playing a crucial role in India’s gold medal win at the Olympiad in Hungary.
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When he won the Candidates in April, Gukesh, aged 18, became the youngest challenger at the World Championship. He was 17 years old at the time.
‘Don’t see it being a close match’
“I have said this many times already both here and on streams and everything else. Basically I would say that should Liren have short-term memory loss where everything that’s happened over the last year goes out of his mind and he is able to play great chess as well, I don’t see it being a close match. I think that all the signs point to a clear and dominating Gukesh victory,” Nakamura, playing for American Gambits in the Global Chess League (GCL) told ChessBase India.
“First of all he is playing much better chess over the last year and a half, secondly he is much younger. So he is still improving. He has not peaked in terms of the level that his chess can get to and then third just look into Ding’s games,” Nakamura added.
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Vietnam’s Le Quang Liem had beaten Ding Liren at the Chess Olympiad in September and Nakamura recalled that match. “I think specifically, I would look at the game against Le Quang Liem because, in that game, he had a marginal advantage of 3.4. It was an endgame. Those are the sorts of games in a World Championship Match you are going to have to win. You are going to have to grind those games out like Magnus has done many times. Not only did he not grind out.
“He then went from better to equal to a very slightly worse endgame and obviously in a World Championship Match where everybody’s super well prepared, you are probably going to get these positions where you are slightly worse and then he didn’t defend that either,” added the 36-year-old. “So he didn’t convert the small advantage, then he turned into a slightly worse endgame which he should have defended but even lost that.”
‘80-20 in favour of Gukesh’
The Japanese-born chess player said that unless Gukesh draws the first four-five matches against Liren, he does not see the Indian losing the contest.
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“So just to me, I just don’t see any world where Gukesh doesn’t win unless Ding is able to say, draw the first four or five games and we get to a moment where if he gets like one great game in the middle and he wins then of course he could win the match but overall I would say it’s probably 80-20. That’s my prediction in favor of Gukesh,” he concluded.
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