The recent FIDE Candidates Chess Tournaments 2024, held at The Great Hall in Toronto, Canada, threw up quite a few stories that have piqued the interest of Chess fans globally over the past 24 hours. Chief among them is the rise of Dommaraju Gukesh, the 17-year-old from Chennai, India, who created tournament history and now has a shot at cementing a legacy few can match.
From a field of eight who battled over 14 rounds and three weeks of play, it was Gukesh, the youngest Indian grandmaster ever, who shocked everyone by winning the tournament. Apart from earning a shot at becoming world champion against incumbent GM Ding Liren later this year, he also became the youngest ever to win this prestigious event.
He had already created a record before the Candidates had even begun, entering it as the second youngest player ever to compete. With his win, he also became the youngest ever to compete at the Chess world championship, just the second Indian to do so after Viswanathan Anand, and the first teenager to challenge for Chess' most coveted crown.
On the women's side, GM Tan Zhongyi, the former women's world champion, got the draw she needed to come out on top and set an all-Chinese world championship match against GM Ju Wenjun. This FIDE Women's World Championship will happen in 2025 and will see the two duke it out in a rematch of their 2018 encounter, which Tan lost.
Such was the hype generated by all this action that the FIDE Candidates Chess Tournaments 2024 reached 337.6K Peak Viewers. This was during the last round of matches when Gukesh had the chance to make history against GM Hikaru Nakamura.
Their draw proved enough after the other match that could affect results and take this Chess tournament into an extra tiebreak day (between GM Fabiano Caruana and GM Ian Nepomniachtchi) also ended in a stalemate. That meant it also registered 9.9M Hours Watched and 124.7K Average Viewers over an airtime of 79h 35m.
On the women's side, the FIDE Woman's Candidates Chess Tournaments 2024 peaked at 9.2K people, also notching 137.9K HW. Tan had won the 2017 world championship in a 64-player knockout before losing 5.5-4.5 to Ju in a match in 2018, with the latter now a four-time champion, having defended the crown for the past six years.
Coming back to Gukesh, his journey has been pretty different from the machine-learning-heavy talents we see today. The India No 1, which ended Anand's 36-year reign at the top, was deliberately kept off Chess engines till he had crossed a rating of 2500.
What made this move risky? This is an era where such engines have fundamentally changed the way players prepare for matches. Here's what his trainer had to say to an Indian media outlet about this radical approach:
"Our aim was to be very precise with calculations and to develop intuition and assessment skills for chess. When you’re playing the game you’re always not completely certain. But if you’re always checking with a computer it gives you a clear definition (of whether a move is good or bad). To keep that confused mindset away we adopted that method. It was an experiment. We didn’t know how it would work out. I just thought it would be a useful experiment and since he never stagnated, we continued with it."
This journey is what captivated audiences the world over to see what the final result would be and who would end up challenging Ding Liren for the world championship gong. That hype also ensured the FIDE Candidates Chess Tournaments 2024 became one of the most successful events ever in the discipline, continuing its great recent run.
It is now Chess' third-most watched competition of all time, behind only the two FIDE World Championships in 2021 and 2023, and just the third to cross 9M HW. The tournament is also the fifth-most popular one ever in the sport, reiterating how much demand there remains for a game that saw renewed focus and attention during the COVID-19 lockdown era.
The details for both the men’s and women’s world championship matches will be revealed soon by FIDE. Until then, fans can check out the various other competitions happening across the global Chess circuit, with a detailed schedule between April and June available here.
