"Gukesh hasn't yet reached a level where he can dominate..." — Anish Giri

Anish Giri

Netherlands' No. 1

“If you see life as a journey in a plane and you are with all these passengers, let’s say it’s a 10-hour journey during the day, so you’re not going to sleep. And they hand out to you a nice game to play, where the goal is to beat the boss in the end.

So, everybody sits on that plane and plays that game and has an amazing time for the 10 hours before they land. But then there’s one guy who is really good at that game, he is much better than the others. And he’s having a blast at first because he’s crushing everyone around. They all want to be that guy, of course.

And that guy is having the best time. But then, as he at some point reaches the boss level and finishes the game in 2 hours, he suddenly realizes that there are 7 hours left to the flight.

And he looks around and the others are still clicking at the game, but he’s already done. And he can’t go back anymore because he’s already done it.

And if you sort of — I don’t know if this comparison makes any sense — but if you think of it that way, then that person, that one guy on the flight who has solved the game — he’s the one who we should feel compassionate towards. He’s the one now having the worst time of all, in a way.

If you see life as a plane journey and your thing as a game, then it kind of makes sense. But I think that there’s more to life than that. And you can do other things on the plane probably as well. So maybe it’s good that you finish this game. Maybe you can now read a book or something. So, there are many things to it, of course.

But if I would look at it that way, I could sort of understand that thing. Of course, it’s easy for me to say, but I think that it would be really great to have achieved that and then you switch to something else. Because, again, life is not limited to the chase of the world championship title. I think by no means. And I would think that if you have completed that chase, you can move on to other things that are also meaningful.

But maybe if that’s been the thing you’ve been chasing since your childhood and throughout your entire professional life, then maybe it is very hard to switch away from that.

And also, the problem is that if you do switch away from that — which maybe Ding did — people around him perceive that something strange is going on, but maybe there’s nothing strange. Maybe he did finish that.

Maybe now he’s moving on from chess, and we see it as something being wrong with him, but maybe everything is right with him. Maybe he’s just done and he’s now having a great time, maybe writing literature. So, we don’t really know. And I think also every story is a little different. For example, Ding was also sometimes vocal about his mental struggles that he experienced.

Gukesh could be an entirely different story. Gukesh might have zero mental struggles. Gukesh might just be the case of him just going through a bad form, because he’s a regular, you know, he’s a very young chess player, he hasn’t yet reached a level where he can dominate. So, he was good enough to be one of the best players and good enough to, when things went his way, to became world champion.

But maybe what we see now is just a logical continuation of his chess career and his growth, and he’s just not yet there. So it could be that every story is different, and Spassky could have his own story…

Right now, I know that to me it would be a very luxurious pro issue to solve if I become world champion. But right now, I’m just really happy, of course, that I’m pursuing that goal.

I’m very, very happy about it, and I of course don’t look beyond, and I don’t think that I should be looking beyond.”