Less than a month to the World Chess Championship match, and world champion D Gukesh seems to be horsing around.
The 20-year-old is in on the joke. Last week, he was at the movies with fellow Indian chess stars Praggnanandhaa and Vaishali, watching the latest Rajinikanth film, Jailer 2 where chess makes an appearance.
In his latest social media post, he was seen on horseback in a field, with the cheeky caption: “They said work on your knight play… instructions unclear. In a now-viral video, they’re seen laughing their heads off over a character’s comically spectacular disregard for the rules of the game with unshakeable confidence – “Yaanaiya eduthomma, raajava adichomma, game-a mudichomma.” (Take the rook, knock out the king and finish the game) It can seem unusual in the lead-up to the match. The history of the World Chess Championship though is dotted with curious ways in which players have prepared for their biggest battles.
Ahead of his 1972 World Championship match against Boris Spassky, Bobby Fischer spent seven months training at Grossinger’s, a resort in New York’s Catskill mountains popular with professional boxers. His daily routine included swimming, tennis, weightlifting, skipping rope, cycling on an exercise bike, sit-ups and punching a 300-pound bag. Roughly a week before his 2010 World Championship match against Veselin Topalov, Viswanathan Anand had gone down a reading rabbit hole about the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun. Gukesh’s opponent for the November 24-December 12 World Championship match in Geneva, Javokhir Sindarov, is still wrapping up his tournament commitments. The 20-year-old Uzbek will compete in the four-player rapid event, 2026 Clutch Chess: Champions Showdown, in Missouri, USA, this week.
“I never let an extra rest day happen before the match with Magnus,” he said in a 2023 Chess.com interview. “The thing with Rapid and Blitz is I enjoy it, it doesn’t take up energy and I don’t feel pressure,” Sindarov told HT in an earlier interview. Spassky, meanwhile, retreated to a country house outside Moscow with his team – running, swimming, doing yoga and daily sessions with a chess-playing psychologist. A volcanic eruption in Iceland had thrown his travel plans into disarray, leaving his wife Aruna and his team of seconds scrambling to find a way to reach Sofia, the Bulgarian capital, in time for the match. Looking back on his defeat in that match, Nepomniachtchi regretted spending his final weeks in Dubai hunched over a laptop. “In the last two or three weeks in Dubai, when I was supposed to go to the beach and swim, drink cocktails, and so on to gather some extra energy and recharge my battery, I was mostly sitting with my laptop and polishing some lines…maybe it’s not such a brilliant strategy to work too much.
