This afternoon, 17 year old Indian chess prodigy Gukesh Dommaraju won the Candidates tournament at the Great Hall here in Toronto. He has earned the right to challenge World Champion Ding Liren to a match to be held later this year.

I’ve been following the tournament on various YouTube live feeds from Chess.com, FIDE and ChessBaseIndia, all with excellent commentary. I’ve enjoyed Sagar Shah’s Vlogs from the streets of Toronto as well as tournament recaps by Hikaru Nakamura and Gotham Chess, all available on YouTube. Chess has surged in popularity since the pandemic, in part sparked by the tv series Queen’s Gambit.

The tournament was a double round-robin format, with no time increments until after 40 moves are completed. There was also a women’s Candidate’s tournament happening at the same time at the same venue. At times the feed showed all the current games live, and at other times, the commentators focused on one or another of the games. Since I’m not a very strong chess player, I appreciated the commentary.

Gukesh has shown tremendous poise this tournament, playing against others with far more experience. He is part of a very strong wave of young Indian players. If they improve much more, I can see India dominating international chess for years to come.

If you want to catch up and see what happened today, check out the latest from Gotham Chess. This fellow does a great job bringing chess games to life.