World champion Gukesh Dommaraju started off his FIDE Grand Swiss campaign with a victory over French grandmaster Etienne Bacrot in 45 moves, while R Praggnanandhaa and Arjun Erigaisi, the other two members of India’s golden gen of chess prodigies, were held to draws in the first round. Pragg, the top seed at the open section, was held by Jeffery Xiong, while Erigaisi played a draw versus Maksim Chigaev.
Hardcore chess fans will do well to remember Bacrot for one of the most unusual acts moments before the start of a chess game. Earlier this year, Bacrot, an eight-time French national champion, had asked Magnus Carlsen for a selfie right before they had faced off in a game at the Grenke Freestyle Chess event. On Thursday, in Samarkand, Bacrot found himself seated in front of another world chess champion. This time, there were no selfies, barely the hint of a smile, and a defeat in 45 moves against Gukesh.
The Swiss tournament offers two golden tickets for the top two finishers into the Candidates tournament, the final step on the path to challenging the world champion for the throne. But the 11-round Grand Swiss is as treacherous a path as you can take to win a Candidates spot. With no elimination, all the 116 players in the open section and the 56 women in the women’s section will stay on in the tournament for all 11 rounds. Making the event even more tricky is that, unlike a round-robin event, a player only finds out late in the day who they face the next day in the subsequent round, usually someone with a similar score as yours. This means that for anyone to win the event, they will keep facing the strongest player they could face each round.
Besides Gukesh, 16 other players secured round 1 victory on Thursday, including India’s Vidit Gujrathi, the defending champion at the event, and Abhimanyu Puranik, who defeated Women’s World Cup winner Divya Deshmukh after a long slog. Nodirbek Abdusattorov, Alireza Firouzja, Anish Giri and the old warhorse Boris Gelfand also secured round 1 wins. In round 2, Gukesh will face another blue blooded prodigy: 14-year-old Yagiz Kaan Erdogmus from Turkey, who holds the distinction of being the youngest grandmaster to reach a 2600 FIDE rating. He was also the fourth-youngest player in history to become a grandmaster.
The other notable result from an Indian perspective was Vaishali Rameshbabu starting off her defence of the Women’s Grand Swiss title with a win over Gulrukhbegim Tokhirjonova. IM Vantika Agrawal also started off with victory, beating Yuliia Osmak.
How Gukesh beat Bacrot
INTERACTIVE: How Gukesh beat Etienne Bacrot
(Scroll down for interactives of all the other games from round 1 featuring prominent Indian players)
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The battle between Gukesh and Bacrot started off with the Indian deploying the Caro Kann Defence, which employs 1…c6, the fourth most common opening move for black in response to 1.e4. It was a move that became the insignia of former world champion Anatoly Karpov. Employing Caro Kann indicated that Gukesh was willing to play a solid game, opting for his pieces to develop slightly slower.
By the 20th move, Bacrot was starting to repeat moves, a clear overture to Gukesh that he was alright with playing out a draw. Gukesh, though, was in no mood to accept an early handshake and powered on. With both kings safely sequestered on the g file, the players took to hopping around rooks and knights, trying to force a mistake from the opponent. The first error from the Frenchman came on move 30, when he abandoned a pawn on the b file, to be gobbled up by Gukesh’s rook.
On move 33, Gukesh’s knight hopped on to the b3 square to deliver one of the most satisfying forks you could hope to see in an elite game: from that square, the knight threatened to capture three of Bacrot’s pieces — the rook on a1, the queen on d2 and the bishop on d4 — giving the Frenchman the opportunity to rescue the life of only one of those three. Understandably, Bacrot’s queen dashed off to a safe square. Here, Gukesh made a pragmatic decision; rather than capturing the rook (which is a stronger piece than a knight or a bishop), he claimed the bishop. Two moves later, Gukesh had another opportunity to capture the rook with his bishop, but opted to pick off a pawn instead, preferring to keep both his bishops on the board. Those two bishops were to become a pair of wrecking balls for the Indian soon enough, bludgeoning a hole in the Frenchman’s castle behind which sat his king.
On move 45, Gukesh’s advantage was too strong for his opponent to continue resisting and he resigned.
