“Gukesh understood that his style was good enough to conquer the world title. Now he wants to become more creative” — GM Mihail Marin

Mihail Marin

Romanian GM

“Gukesh hasn’t done well lately. His results are poor let’s say for such a level. He’s dropping rating. He’s losing games. He’s close to 2700 now. And I will try to understand what that means.

Of course, there is a simplistic answer which may be the true answer. I don’t know but I will not take it as granted. The simplistic answer would be okay. He exhausted the energy he had to conquer the title. He’s young. He entered another phase of physical and mental development. He’s not so focused anymore. Things like that or something like at least for a while he’s done.

I don’t really buy that. I mean maybe it’s true. I repeat, but I will try to think of something different.

I have gone through some of his games and I think that something is changing in his style because no matter how accurate he was in all these games from his best periods, the feeling was that he was not creating much. He was just playing. He was just playing, not making mistakes and exploiting the mistakes of the opponent.

I remember an old video by Korchnoi about his enemy Karpov. He said something like: ‘His name is Karpov from ‘Karp’ which is a fish in Russian. And he’s cold like a fish and he plays like a fish. He doesn’t create anything.’

Well, of course, Korchnoi was exaggerating, but maybe he had some point. Karpov was also playing very well. He didn’t create as much as Kasparov, but he was just playing very sound chess and this was enough to dominate the chess arena for at least 10 years.

So, I would try to compare it with what I said about Gukesh. If you just play move by move without having a very original plan, a very deep concept, and you just play good moves — that should do for a long time. Maybe not to dominate the arena but to be in top 3 or something like that. And Gukesh is just dropping now.

And my opinion is that he tries to change his style. Maybe he understood that he was done with his old style and that it was good enough to conquer the world title. And now he wants to become more creative to go for such positions where only calculating is not enough, where you have to create, where you have to find moves and not just calculate lines very accurately.

This is like when an old knight would change his armor. It’s a better armor, but until you get used to it, you may have some problems adapting yourself.”