Caruana Picked Gukesh and Swept the World Champion

Fabiano Caruana chose world champion Gukesh Dommaraju as his last-eight opponent at the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam in Weissenhaus, then beat him 0-2.

Gukesh resigned the second game after 18 moves on February 10, 2025, and later finished eighth in the 10-player field without a win.

Caruana Picked Gukesh Before a Piece Was Placed

The opening week at Gut Weissenhaus in Wangels, Germany, was a rapid round-robin that only set the bracket. Gukesh, 18, scored 3.5 points from seven draws and two losses, sneaking into eighth. Caruana, 32, took third on six points and, under tour rules, picked his knockout opponent from the players who had placed fifth through eighth.

He did not take Hikaru Nakamura or Nodirbek Abdusattorov. He took the new classical champion, and he took Black in game one. After that win he said the choice had been a toss-up on rating, with Gukesh around 2790 and Abdusattorov around 2780, and that Gukesh still carried more high-stakes games after beating Ding Liren for the 2024 world title in Singapore.

“I think for me Gukesh was a bit more of an unknown than Nodirbek Abdusattorov in some ways,” Caruana said. “We have a lot of experience against each other, we played a match here last year.” He had also guessed, correctly, that Javokhir Sindarov would not pick his Uzbek countryman, which is why Abdusattorov was still on the board when Caruana’s turn came.

THE LAST-EIGHT DRAFT

• First pick: Alireza Firouzja, on 6.5, chose Vincent Keymer and lost 0.5-1.5.
• Second pick: Sindarov, also on 6.5, chose Nakamura and won 2.5-1.5.
• Third pick: Caruana chose Gukesh and won 2-0.
• Last pairing: Magnus Carlsen was left with Abdusattorov and won 2-0.

The Weissenhaus knockout bracket then sent Caruana toward a final, and Gukesh into the fifth-through-eighth pool. The four highest-rated players in the field were all in the building. Only one of them had just been chosen as prey.

A Queen Sacrifice Gukesh Never Found

Game one, on February 9, was the game Carlsen later said could have gone either way. Gukesh had White. For a long stretch he was in the fight, then he missed a queen sacrifice in the late middlegame and Caruana took over. Caruana said afterward that a draw would have been a fair result and that he could have lost if the tactics had broken the other way.

“The win is great of course, especially in a game like that where anything could have happened,” he said. “I could have definitely lost if things hadn’t gone my way.”

Gukesh was down to one second in a lost ending at one point, with a heart rate of 78 beats per minute. He still had to come back the next day with Black and win on demand, or the match was over.

Why Gukesh Resigned After 18 Moves

The second starting position did not give him a fight. Judit Polgar, on the broadcast, said the array favored White, that Caruana’s king began on c1, and that a player who only needed a draw had almost no danger if he kept the position simple. Caruana’s knight took a pawn on f5 as early as move six.

Engine files had a clear capture on a2 with the bishop. Gukesh instead played 6…g6, kicking the knight. The knight stepped back to d4, and only then did he take on a2. That sequence woke the rook on a1. By move 10 the rook had taken on a7. By move 13 Gukesh had castled and was already a pawn down in a sour structure. On move 17 he played c5, not Nd7. Caruana castled on move 18, and Gukesh stopped the clocks.

THE 18-MOVE COLLAPSE

• Move 6: After 6.Nxf5, Gukesh plays g6; the engine’s capture is 6…Bxa2.
• Move 7: The knight returns to d4, then 7…Bxa2 opens the a-file for White’s rook.
• Move 10: 10.Rxa7 wins a pawn and keeps the rook on the seventh.
• Move 13: Gukesh castles a pawn down after a pair of bishop trades.
• Move 17: 17…c5, not 17…Nd7, leaves him with no winning try.
• Move 18: Caruana’s 18.O-O ends the must-win, and Gukesh resigns.

Caruana’s accuracy in that game was 97%. Gukesh’s was 85.6%. White had the extra pawn, a safe king, and a cleaner pawn chain. Black’s king sat on g7. There was no path to the win Gukesh had to have.

Carlsen Called the Stop a Prudent Decision

Caruana did not claim he had expected the handshake on move 18. “I didn’t expect it exactly at that moment but I also didn’t understand what he could possibly do,” he said. “I would consider resigning as Black although maybe I wouldn’t do it quite so early.”

Yesterday’s game could have gone either way and today of course it was never very likely that Gukesh was going to come back and honestly I think he made a kind of prudent decision just resigning when he realised that he was not going to make a comeback. Just see it as a bit of a lost event in that sense. He had his chance yesterday, he didn’t take it and then you move on.

Magnus Carlsen, on Take Take Take

Carlsen, who called the 18-move stop prudent in that same interview, had just beaten Abdusattorov 2-0 and sounded glad to be in a classical mini-match. The shorter knockout, he said, hangs on a single game. Gukesh had that game on February 9 and did not convert it.

What Eighth Place Paid at Weissenhaus

The published payouts for the first leg totaled $660,000. Fifth place was still worth $50,000 and 10 tour points. Eighth paid $20,000 and four points. Gukesh had to play for that band once the Caruana match ended.

He drew Nakamura in the first game of the fifth-through-eighth pool, then lost the match in tiebreaks. In the seventh-place pairing he drew Firouzja with Black on February 13, then lost with White in 30 moves on February 14. Firouzja took seventh and $30,000. Gukesh took eighth.

WEISSENHAUS FINAL PAYOUTS

Levon Aronian took $12,500 for ninth. Vladimir Fedoseev took $7,500 for 10th. Caruana’s draft had already done the expensive work: the gap between second and eighth was $120,000 and 14 tour points.

Chess960 and the Title That Did Not Travel

Freestyle Chess is Chess960, the shuffle Bobby Fischer pushed so that the first 10 moves would not be homework. Bishops start on opposite colors, the king starts between the two rooks, and Black mirrors White. After that the pieces move as in classical chess, with castling still ending on the familiar squares. There are 960 legal starting positions, and the players saw the array only minutes before each round.

CHESS960 CONSTRAINTS

• Bishops: They must start on opposite-colored squares.
• King: It must stand between the two rooks on the back rank.
• Castling: The king and rook still finish on the classical squares, g1 and f1 or c1 and d1 for White.

That is the entire point of the tour. Gukesh had just become classical world champion by out-preparing Ding over a long match. On a shuffled back rank the file he had built for Singapore was blank paper. He did not win a game in eight days at Weissenhaus. The title still named him as the man to pick. The board did not care.

Polgar had walked the grounds that week thinking about Fischer showing her the same idea in Budapest in 1993, when a Grand Slam in this format still sounded impossible.

I was walking this morning in the neighbourhood of Weissenhaus🇩🇪 before today's games. Many thoughts came to my mind… Bobby Fischer was our guest in 1993 in Budapest, and he showed us his initiative, the Chess960. We played and talked about that. It seemed impossible then, and… pic.twitter.com/bUUqnTfC3W

— Judit Polgar (@GMJuditPolgar) February 8, 2025

Some players around that broadcast still want chess left as it was. Others treat 960 as the version that forces calculation from move one. Gukesh’s week sat in the gap between those camps: the classical champion, chosen because of that title, and then erased by a starting position he had not memorized.

The Trophy Went to Gukesh’s Old Second

THE WEEK AT WEISSENHAUS

1. February 7 to 8, 2025: Rapid round-robin. Firouzja and Sindarov finish on 6.5. Gukesh takes the last knockout spot on 3.5.
2. February 9, 2025: Caruana beats Gukesh with Black in game one of the last eight.
3. February 10, 2025: Gukesh resigns after 18 moves with Black. Caruana reaches the semifinals.
4. February 11, 2025: Gukesh draws Nakamura in the fifth-through-eighth pool. Keymer beats Carlsen in the other semifinal.
5. February 13 to 14, 2025: Keymer beats Caruana 1.5-0.5 in the final. Gukesh loses the seventh-place match to Firouzja 0.5-1.5.

Keymer, who had sat in Gukesh’s corner for the 2024 title match, took the $200,000 first prize on home soil. Caruana, who had picked the champion and swept him, took second and $140,000. Carlsen took third. The man who walked in as world champion left with four tour points and a week that never produced a win.

Caruana got the matchup he asked for and the 2-0 he needed. Gukesh got the next Black game he had to win, and he lasted 18 moves.