Winning ploy: Play long, tire Ding out

Gukesh's trainer Gajewski speaks about how the team of seconds was built, the biggest challenge during the match, and value of surprises

- Susan Ninan

BENGALURU: Grzegorz Gajewski was on his way to dinner on Thursday night, running through lines for Friday's possible tie-breaks when Ding Liren blundered and lost in what was seemingly a drawn game. The match ended abruptly and at 18, Gukesh Dommaraju turned the 18th world champion. It was the pay-off of a strategy that Team Gukesh, led by Gajewski, had put in place.

"Ding was a bit of a mystery coming into this match...During the match, every day, we were learning new things about him - the way he plays, also the way he feels and evaluates positions," the 39-year-old Pole told HT on Friday. "Actually, quite quickly, we came up with this idea that it's best to make Ding play for as long as possible, every single game, ideally six hours, just to exhaust him. We assumed that in the long run, this strategy just has to pay off. It eventually did."

While Gajewski was in Singapore, the rest of the team was tucked away in Spain. The Polish-Indian-German combine of Radoslaw Wojtaszek, Pentala Harikrishna and Vincent Keymer stayed put in a rented seaside villa, an hour from Malaga, in the south of Spain and remotely helped with the ideas. Gukesh revealed his team only after he won the match on Thursday.

"Countries such as Poland, Germany or Czech Republic in late November or December, are not the best places to spend a couple of weeks together. The weather is simply miserable most of the time. Spain is glorious because the sun is just pleasant. Of course, the time zones helped because the moment the games started in Singapore, the guys woke up and we could discuss the next day's game. So, I think it worked out beautifully," said Gajewski.

The team was handpicked ahead of the Candidates tournament, which Gukesh won.