The final act of D. Gukesh’s homecoming lasted only 19 moves.
A repetition against Hans Niemann brought a quick draw in the seventh and final round of the Chennai Grand Masters on Wednesday. It also confirmed a result few would have anticipated before the tournament: the world champion finished last in the eight-player field with two points, without a single victory.
The brief final-round encounter offered neither the recovery Gukesh needed nor any further damage. After two draining defeats in successive rounds, it instead brought a subdued end to a tournament that had steadily slipped away from him.
For Gukesh, this was his first tournament in Chennai since becoming world champion in December 2024. The occasion promised the comfort of familiar surroundings and an opportunity to arrest a difficult year. Instead, three defeats and four draws deepened the concerns surrounding his form ahead of his title defence against Uzbekistan’s Javokhir Sindarov.
“He must be disappointed with the results, but anyway he will play some more games. Right now, it feels like we’re all beating him on the head with this. He’s had a bad streak for a while, but he can snap out of it,” five-time world champion Viswanathan Anand told the media on the sidelines of the Chennai Grand Masters.
Anand’s comments came before the full extent of the damage was known. Gukesh subsequently lost successive games to Arjun Erigaisi and M. Pranesh, both after obtaining positions that offered him considerably more than defeat.
That, more than the final number of points, captured his present problem.
Against Arjun, Gukesh produced an opening surprise and secured a winning position, only for a 23-minute think to leave him short of time. The advantage disappeared after 30.Bg7, when 30.Bf4 was required, and he later declined opportunities to force a draw before losing the endgame.
A day later, Gukesh found the excellent 21.Nxb4 against Pranesh and appeared close to taking control. But he again fell behind on the clock, allowed his advantage to slip and couldn’t save the position that followed. It was his second loss from a winning position in as many rounds. His live rating was placed at 2702.9 after that defeat.
The draw on Wednesday should leave him at approximately 2703, narrowly preserving his place in the 2700 club. It is still a steep fall from his career-high 2794 in October 2024. His official July rating of 2717 had already left him 26th in the world, and the Chennai results are expected to push him further down the next list.
Gukesh’s body language has remained characteristically restrained. There have been no visible outbursts or dramatic reactions, and he has continued his routine of meditating before games. The more revealing signs have come from the clock: extended thinks, mounting time pressure and hurried decisions at the moments when accuracy was most needed.
Alireza Firouzja, who defeated him in the second round, acknowledged the resistance he encountered. “He was defending very well,” the Frenchman said after a game in which Gukesh survived several difficult phases before finally losing the knight endgame.
Chennai, however, wasn’t an isolated setback. In four classical tournaments this year, Gukesh has recorded five wins, 20 draws and 14 defeats.
He began with 6.5 points from 13 rounds at the Tata Steel Masters, finishing 10th. At the Prague Masters, he managed only one victory and finished joint-last with 3.5/9. His immediate classical tournament before Chennai was Norway Chess, where he again finished last after winning one, drawing four and losing five of his 10 classical games. His second half in Oslo ended with four successive defeats.
The pattern is therefore more concerning than any single placing. Gukesh is still producing strong ideas and finding difficult moves, but hasn’t sustained his accuracy across a complete game. Positions he once converted are being allowed to drift, while the ambition that powered him through open tournaments, the Candidatees and the World Championship has sometimes worked against him.
Gukesh has acknowledged the problem. “Sometimes when you want the result too much, it gets in the way,” he told media after Norway Chess. He also admitted that finding fresh motivation had been difficult after achieving his childhood dream of becoming world champion.
The contrast with Sindarov is stark.
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The Uzbek finished second at Tata Steel with an unbeaten 8.5/13 before dominating the Candidates in Cyprus. His unbeaten 10/14 was the highest score in the event’s current double round-robin format, earning him the right to challenge Gukesh with a round to spare.
Sindarov followed it by finishing joint-third at the Super Chess Classic in Romania with 5/9, recovering from his only classical defeat of the year with successive late wins. Across those three tournaments, he won 12 games and lost only once in 36. Praggnanandhaa, the player who ended his 53-game unbeaten classical streak in Romania, described the Uzbek as being in “terrifying form”.
Sindarov is rated around 73 points above Gukesh on the live list, a significant reversal from the beginning of the year.
Yet Sindarov has refused to read too much into Gukesh’s results. “He doesn’t have weaknesses that you can see,” the Uzbek told the media during Norway Chess in June.
Tournament form provides evidence, but a World Championship match is a different test, centred on one opponent, months of preparation and the ability to recover between games.
That distinction also protects Gukesh from being judged only by the current rating gap. Sindarov will be playing his first World Championship match, while Gukesh has already experienced its unusual pressure, long preparation and daily emotional swings. The champion’s greater match experience is one advantage that recent tournament results cannot measure.
There are precedents for champions arriving at a title defence in uncertain form. Anand described 2011, the year after his victory over Veselin Topalov, as “a slow year in general”. Although his slump wasn’t as pronounced as Gukesh’s, his classical momentum had diminished before he faced Boris Gelfand in 2012. Anand still held the match at 6-6 and retained the title in the rapid tiebreak.
The more recent comparison is Ding Liren. Before defending his title against Gukesh in 2024, Ding had gone 304 days without a classical victory and entered the match on a 28-game winless run. He nevertheless won the opening game and remained level after 13 games, losing the title only after his decisive error in the final encounter.
Gukesh’s performance in that match provides another reason against assuming his present slump will continue indefinitely. He recovered from losing the opening game to defeat Ding in Game Three. When Ding struck back in Game 12 to level the contest, Gukesh steadied himself with a draw in the penultimate game before applying the pressure that produced the decisive error in Game 14.
That capacity to reset after setbacks was one of the strongest features of his title-winning campaign. It has been less visible in tournaments this year, particularly when one bad result has been followed by another, but it hasn’t been erased by a poor run.
None of this makes Gukesh’s present form irrelevant. It does show that it isn’t necessarily predictive.
The Olympiad in Samarkand offers his next major classical test and, as Anand suggested, perhaps the stimulus of playing for India can help break the cycle. Beyond that lies Sindarov, whose confidence, rating and recent results make him a formidable challenger.
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Published on Jul 22, 2026