Youngest world champion EVER

If Gukesh wins the candidates, then beats Ding in the fall, will he be the youngest world champion ever?

All hail the new Goat!

Yes.

Kasparov was 22.

Go Gu!

That would be cool, yes.

On the other hand, Nepo is a fighter, and I'd be satisfied to see him win it.

Gukesh won the candidates. Is he now the youngest ever challenger?

Must be

Yes.

Good luck to him!

Yes, indeed. Many happy years, and all the best come November.

Magnus would've been the youngest but he withdrew from the whole thing because FIDE made him mad because they changed the qualifications mid cycle & he thought that was unfair. It delayed him winning the title by a few years. I'm pretty sure he could've won the match against Anand 2 or 3 years sooner, he was #1 in the world rankings at 19 years old.

Interesting. Yes, Carlsen was rated #1 at 19, but dropped out of the 2012 Candidates at the age of 21. Was he a potential challenger at 17?

We all know Carlsen is the actual world champion, yes ? He's still the top rated player. He just didnt feel like doing it again.

Elo really kind of does away with the need for any world championship title. The whole point initially of a world championship is for to determine who is the absolute best player in the world, but there is usually no doubt about it. Even when Kasparov lost to Kramnik everyone knew Kasparov was still really the best player. For an argument that it should be head-to-head rather than elo that can benefit from farming low-rated opponents well just take the recent head-to-head score of the two-top ranked players' results in official FIDE tournaments, no need for a special tournament.

If it's insisted on having a world championship cycle for whatever remaining flimsy arguments (I mean, I know they do special preparation for it they don't normally do in tournaments) at least lengthen the cycle out to 4 or 5, maybe even 6 years so the world champion doesn't have to keep coming back repeating the same thing again and again. Also double the amount of games and halve the amount of time for them.

The real reason, of course, for the 2 year cycle is because it looks to organizers like they make twice the money than if it were 4 years at the sacrifice of the quality of the world championship and world champion holder. Think about how in the recent past many people could name most or all of the past world champions, Kasparov wrote a book about the world champions. Being the world champion meant something - ok obviously it still means something, but people like Ding and Kramnik going down in history as world champions, it just doesn't sit right.

Even though I just had a painful loss, I was feeling at my absolute best.

—Gukesh Dommaraju

If you compare the mental attitude of the challenger against the current World Champion, you will quickly see who is favourite to win the next World Chess Championship.

It is in Carlsen's interests to downplay Gukesh's achievements, because it influences how people perceive Carlsen's place in history. Even so, when Carlsen was commentating during the final game, he felt obliged to pay compliments to Gukesh given how much he had surpassed Carlsen's tournament predictions.

Unless Ding goes back to his former playing strength he will probably lose his title to Gukesh. However, it should be remembered how strong Ding is when playing well. He was rated 2816 at his peak and Magnus Carlsen has only been able to defeat Ding one time out of ten games in classical with nine draws. Do you know anyone else that has that kind of record against Carlsen? I still don't know what kind of problems Ding had but if he plays at full strength Gukesh will have his hands full.

The World Championship event winner is not the same thing as being the top ranked player in the world.

Posted this on another thread earlier today but why is chess so special in making this conflation?

Very often in other competitions which have World Championships, e.g. football, the world champions are often not the number one ranked team. Yet no-one looks upon the World Champions as being inferior.

Number one in the rankings is a completely different thing...

The real reason Magnus doesn't wanna play is that he is too good. He won everything, like literally everything. He just sits there and knows them all anyway.

"Sometimes I act like I am thinking" -Magnus Carlsen

Am really not sure what you're talking about here. Are you talking about FIFA rankings? The FIFA rankings are in place for seeding and the like. Nobody pays any attention to it. The FIFA rankings are known to be a bit of a joke, they're unfair and the system is like it is for beurocratic reasons. Now that you mention it, maybe one of the reasons why the FIFA rankings are the joke they are is so people won't start to take them seriously, thereby reducing the importance of the major competitions. I hadn't thought of that.

Otherwise are you talking about world football elo rankings the website? That website doesn't really have any real legitimacy, it's literally just some random guy who calculated how the teams should be ranked based on the Elo formula. Again nobody knows or cares much about it. Also, it would be hard to argue that a team that wins the world cup is not actually the best team due to not gaining enough Elo on the way or something, especially since that team may already be through in certain qualifiers and playing their B side.