Teenager Gukesh Dommaraju of India became the youngest chess world champion by beating defending champion Ding Liren of China on Friday morning (NZ time) in a dramatic turn of events in the last game of a 14-game match in Singapore.<\/p>\n
The 18th world champion is at age 18 four years younger than Garry Kasparov, who had been the youngest world champion since 1985 when he beat Anatoly Karpov.<\/p>\n
Gukesh won the game with the black pieces after Ding wilted under pressure and blundered in what commentators considered to be a comfortable position, snatching the title with a final score of 7.5-6.5.<\/p>\n
Ding, whose form has plummeted since he beat Russian Ian Nepomniachtchi to claim the crown in 2023, had not won a long-time format “classical” game since January and largely avoided top events in a bid to improve.<\/p>\n
But the Chinese player regained confidence after a surprise win in the opening round of the match and, following two wins for Gukesh and eight draws, had evened the score in round 12 with a victory which was acclaimed by several commentators.<\/p>\n
The match was a 14-round long-time “classical” event with a prize fund of $2.5 million.<\/p>\n
Gukesh had qualified in April by winning the Candidates tournament.<\/p>\n
World number one Magnus Carlsen, who had been world champion since 2013, relinquished his title in 2022, citing a lack of motivation.<\/p>\n
– Reuters<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Teenager Gukesh Dommaraju of India became the youngest chess world champion by beating defending champion Ding Liren of China on Friday morning (NZ time) in a dramatic turn of events in the last game of a 14-game match in Singapore. The 18th world champion is at age 18 four years younger than Garry Kasparov, who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":12094,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12093"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12093\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12095,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12093\/revisions\/12095"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}