Is Gukesh actually the youngest World Chess champion? Yes, but there is a catch

Who held the record of youngest champion before Gukesh?

In the short line of world chess champions over a long period of time — starting way back in 1886 — there were 17 men who claimed the crown before Gukesh. At 18, Gukesh became the first teenager to do so, to become the 18th champion.

Officially, Gukesh broke the record held by Garry Kasparov — who was 22 years, six months and 27 days old.

Magnus Carlsen, five-time World Champion who has recently decided not to play in the World Championships any longer, was 22 years, 11 months and 24 days when he won his first championship in 2013, beating Viswanathan Anand in Chennai.

So what is the issue here?

There is a small catch to Gukesh’s record. And it comes in the name of Ruslan Ponomariov.

According to Chess.com, the right way to describe Gukesh’s achievement would be: “youngest universally recognized champion in the history of chess. Ponomariov won a separate FIDE world title in a knockout tournament in 2002 at a slightly younger age, but not by beating the reigning champion in a match.”

So who is Ruslan Ponomariov?

The name may be familiar to lovers of chess trivia.

Ponomariov was a prodigy who once held the record for being the youngest Grandmaster. In 1997, the Ukrainian became the youngest to earn the Grandmaster title in history at that time, at 14 years, 0 months, 17 days.

The record was subsequently broken in 1999 by Bu Xiangzhi (13 years, 10 months, 13 days) before Sergey Karjakin came along in 2002 at 12 years, 7 months, 0 days and held the record for nearly two decades.

What’s the dispute here?

Ponomariov’s next big breakthrough came in 2002 when he clinched the FIDE World Chess Championship title by defeating his fellow Ukrainian Vasyl Ivanchuk with a score of 4.5 to 2.5. That was a 128-player knockout event with two-game matches in the first five rounds, followed by four-game matches in the semifinals, and then eight-game matches in the final round (where Ponomariov faced Ivanchuk).

While this made him the youngest World Champion at the time, the title wasn’t considered undisputed due to the ongoing split in the chess world, with the championship being decided through a knockout tournament format.

In the numerical order that places Gukesh as the 18th world champion, No13 is Garry Kasparov who is deemed to have held the title from 1993–2000, followed by Vladimir Kramnik, who reigned from 2000–2006.

What was the controversy in chess back then?

The roots for the divide in the chess world dated back to 1985 when FIDE chief Florencio Campomanes stopped a Kasparov-Karpov match from taking place. It sowed the seeds for chaos, and all hell broke loose in 1993 when Kasparov split away from FIDE to set up the Professional Chess Association.

“Ever since 1993 there have been two titles, the phoney one controlled and organised by FIDE and the real one organised outside FIDE’s control,” IM David Levy wrote for Chessbase in 2004.

“While Kasparov was defending his title against the strongest opponents of the day, FIDE continued to conduct a “World Championship” of its own. But the idea of FIDE’s event was not to find out who was the strongest chess player in the world at the time of their event, instead it was merely a tournament in which the winner would be designated, by FIDE, as ‘World Champion’,” he wrote.

To cut a long story short, the period from 1993-2006 in the world of chess was riddled with conflict.

When was the dispute resolved?

In 2006, the unification took place. The two players who held the World Chess Champion titles – Classical World Chess Champion Kramnik and FIDE World Chess Champion Veselin Topalov – were brought together to crown an undisputed World Champion. That has carried on till now, with Gukesh, “officially”, the 18th undisputed world champion and, indeed, the youngest.