Reigning World Chess Champion Gukesh Dommaraju has spoken out after his stunning victory over the former World No. 1 Magnus Carlsen in round six of the Norway Chess 2025 tournament.
The two faced off Sunday, with Dommaraju of India, 19, beating the Norwegian grandmaster Carlsen, 34, in a match that lasted more than four hours.
While Carlsen had led most of the game, he ended up losing his knight in a faulty move, eventually leading to Dommaraju’s victory.
When Carlsen realized he had lost, he instantly slammed his fist on the table, causing the chess pieces to fall. Standing up, he shook Dommaraju’s hand before turning away and huffing, “Oh my god,” in frustration. He then quickly apologized to his opponent.
After the match, Dommaraju admitted that his win was “not the way I wanted it to be, but okay, I will take it,” per Chess.com.
Addressing Carlsen’s outburst, he sympathized, saying: “I have also banged a lot of tables in my career.”
In shock at his triumph, Dommaraju humbly admitted that “99 out of 100 times I would lose. But it was just a lucky day.”
Dommaraju’s win increased his point total by three, putting him in third place at 8.5. Carlsen remains tied for first with Italian-American chess grandmaster Fabiano Caruana at 9.5 points in the five-player round-robin tournament. The ongoing tournament, which lasts until June 6, has a 1,690,000 Norwegian Krone ($167,000) prize fund.
Sunday’s match marked Dommaraju’s first time beating Carlsen in a classical match. It was also their first classic match since Carlsen returned to individual classic chess after taking a brief break.
Carlsen, who’s been ranked the No. 1 chess player in the FIDE world rankings for nearly 15 years straight, declined to defend his world championship title in 2022, citing his frustration with the current format.
“I think if we reduce the time controls, made it more games, that would be a very good start,” he previously suggested.
In December 2024, Dommaraju went on to defeat China’s Ding Liren to become the youngest chess world champion at 18 years old. Carlsen sat out of that tournament as well.
“Becoming the world champion doesn’t mean I am the best player in the world. Obviously, there is Magnus Carlsen and he will always be a motivating factor for me,” Dommaraju said after his world championship title win.
He went on to credit Carlsen’s world championship win over Indian chess wizard Viswanathan Anand in 2013 as his motivation to one day “bring back the title to India.”
“I was in the stands and I was looking inside the glass box and I thought it’d be so cool to be inside one day,” Dommaraju remembered at the time. “And when Magnus won, I thought I really wanted to be the one to bring back the title to India and this dream that I had like more than 10 years ago has been the single most important thing in my life so far.”
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