Picture Credit: X
Norwegian GM Magnus Carlsen gave an emphatic prediction on the upcoming World Chess Championship match between challenger Dommaraju Gukesh and world champion Ding Liren, which will start on Monday, November 25, in Singapore. The 33-year-old remarked that there could be bloodbath on the chess board in the next couple of weeks, and he expects Gukesh to come out victorious especially if Liren doesn’t convert his chances in the early stages.
Notably, ahead of the World Chess Championship match, many of the grandmasters are predicting Dommaraju Gukesh to become the new world champion, including the likes of Wesley So, Leinier Dominguez, and Sam Shankland, while Fabiano Caruana has picked Ding Liren to retain the title. Hikaru Nakamura stated that the win for the Chinese will set chess back a few years, while Garry Kasparov isn’t treating it as a World Chess Championship match.
In his assessment of the title fight, Magnus Carlsen sees a lot of decisive games if Ding Liren manages to find his form against a very confident Dommaraju Gukesh. He was quoted as saying, as per Chess.com, “The only way there's going to be a low number of decisive games is that Ding gets chances and keeps missing them. We could see a bloodbath. What I hope to see in that sense is what we had with Ding against Nepomniachtchi, where they just kept trading blows, because they played really risky chess, sensing that the other was vulnerable, and also neither of them could defend at all.”
Hikaru Nakamura was of the opinion that it is important for Dommaraju Gukesh to win the World Chess Championship match, to add more to the interest in chess in India currently. He remarked, “Since you want hot takes, I would say I tend to think about things in a way where everything happens for a reason. I think that if we are objective about the situation, a Ding win would be very bad for chess. With all the interest in India at the moment I think that a Ding win would perhaps set chess back by two or four years.”
