Gukesh D, the youngest world champion in the history of the sport, made a rare appearance in the Titled Tuesday online event and ended in 18th position with a score of eight wins from 11 games. The event was won by Hikaru Nakamura, who has now won 105 Titled Tuesday online events. The Titled Tuesday is an online blitz chess tournament. It must be noted that Gukesh rarely plays in online tournaments and blitz, one of the fastest formats in the sport, is not his forte as evidenced at the recent SuperUnited Rapid and Blitz Croatia tournament.
Gukesh was playing in the Early Titled Tuesday tournament (there is a Late Titled Tuesday event also later in the day), where his three losses came against International Master LR Srihari, Nakamura and Parham Maghsoodloo. He beat a couple of strong players like Alexey Sarana and Jan-Krzysztof Duda (who helped him become world champion as a second).
“Rather shockingly, one of the rare occurrences is seeing current world chess champion Gukesh actually playing in a Titled Tuesday event,” Nakamura said on his video recap for his YouTube channel after winning the title. “He has played this event before, but it’s very rare to see him play.”
The online Titled Tuesday tournament — which is organised by Chess.com twice on Tuesday each week — sees a prize fund of $1,000 for the winner. Players like Magnus Carlsen and Nakamura are regulars at the events, usually also opting to play the event when they’re in the middle of over-the-board chess tournaments as long as the tournament timings don’t clash. The Titled Tuesday tournament is played in the Swiss format, where each player gets three minutes on the clock for a game with a one second increment added to their clock for each move.
Gukesh had previously played in the event a few months ago, where he had almost won the event with a score of 9.5 out of 11. He ended only behind eventual winner Javokhir Sindarov on tiebreak regulations.
Gukesh is not a regular in online tournaments, preferring to prioritise playing in over-the-board classical events, a strategy that has gone well with his style and propelled him to the world chess championship throne at the age of 18 last year. Blitz is not one of the formats he excels in, as became apparent at the recently-concluded SuperUnited Rapid and Blitz Croatia tournament where Gukesh was leading the tournament after nine rounds of rapid, but fell to third after 18 rounds of blitz after just four wins and three days.
Gukesh’s calculation-based style of play is not conducive to a fast time control like blitz. As Nakamura pointed out on his YouTube handle while analysing his game against Gukesh: “When I played bishop to f8 (18…Bf8), I was basically asking Gukesh what he was going to do? Here Gukesh spends almost one minute (in a three-minute game) before playing bishop to b4 (19.b4). This really highlights the differences between players like Gukesh, who are more about pure calculation, as compared to more intuitive platters like myself or Praggnanandhaa or Hans Niemann. There was nothing wrong with the move but specifically because he spends one minute on the clock, he’s now on the backfoot, he’s down by 30 seconds.”
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