Gukesh's incredible powers of self-awareness led him to World title: Paddy Upton

Bengaluru: Paddy Upton, the renowned mental conditioning coach who worked with D Gukesh, said the “incredible self-awareness” of the 18-year-old Indian Grandmaster powered him to a historic World Chess Championship title.

Gukesh became the youngest ever world champion when he defeated China’s Ding Liren 7.5-6.5 to annex the crown at Singapore on Thursday.

“I think the most fascinating thing working with Gukesh was his level of self-awareness, just to really recognise where his thoughts are being directed. So, if there was even a moment on the chessboard where he found himself overthinking he had an amazing awareness of it, when his mind drifted off and that’s quite unique,” Upton told PTI.

“Gukesh has incredible powers of self-awareness and a lot of our work was helping him identify what were the things that would potentially distract his focus. So yeah, I think that’s the thing that’s really stood out, his ability to recognise his thoughts and manage his mind and his understanding of how to do so.

“And kudos to him, he is a world champion because he was able to manage himself and remain focused and stay in the game even though he’s 0-1 down right from the beginning. So that really is a mark of a champion, they cannot be set back by such a big and early setback.” One of the key aspects that Upton drove into Gukesh was that he did not have to overreach to be at his best in each of the 14 games.

“One of the things that I really drilled into Gukesh is that one of the biggest mistakes that athletes make when they’re approaching the biggest event of their life is they think they need to play the best they’ve ever played in their whole life or even better, and that’s a huge mistake.

“So, athletes end up over-efforting in the big moments, and the thing with Gukesh was just to get him to consistently play his natural best chess, and that was going to be good enough,” he said.

The biggest challenge Gukesh and Upton faced was to keep the mental sharpness over three weeks of intense and draining chess.

They had a plan for it.

“We always knew it was going to be a three-week affair. It was going to be a ding-dong battle. It was going to be long and sustained.

“We had a very clear strategy. About three weeks before the tournament, we stopped doing any new work. I told him, this is now time, we’re just going to consolidate everything we’ve already done.

“Let’s just make sure that we really ingrain this in his brain. And he also had a very high-level, two-page document that I sent to him that summarised the mental strategy for the 18 days. He had that both in his head and he had it on paper. But credit to him and his team that they were able to execute it,” he explained.

So, what was the nature of his conversations with Gukesh? Was it intense? Casual? Or purely cerebral? “We had deeply theoretical conversations and went deep into theory and ideas and concepts compared to some athletes who maybe are more emotionally based and maybe less intellectual and the conversation needs to be quite different.

“The conversations with Gukesh extended to all areas of his life that he was prepared to speak about. One of the things that in my experience working with athletes is about one third of the things that undermine their performance originates from things away from the sport.

“So it’s a significant area of distraction that very few athletes actually get to speak about and hardly ever can they speak to their coach about it. That’s one of the advantages of having a mental coach who you can literally speak about anything. Thus he was open to speak about all aspects of his life, not just chess.” For Upton, it was a different experience to work with a chess Grandmaster.

“The difference between sports is…it’s not so much between sports, but between individuals. Sometimes I work with two opening batsmen who’ve got very different personalities, so the work I do with them and the way I work is very different.

“And Gukesh, it was not so much the chess, but the uniqueness of him as an individual being very thoughtful, very sincere, very introverted, very cerebral. It was different,” said Upton, who in the past worked with the Indian cricket team that won the 2011 World Cup and the Indian men’s hockey team that clinched a bronze in the Paris Olympics.

However, the South African said building a connection with Gukesh was not an easy job in the beginning and he had his own trepidations.

“My association started with Gukesh when I was introduced to him about six months ago, shortly after he won the Candidates by Westbridge Capital, who is his sponsor, asking if I’d consider working with him. Initially, I was a bit hesitant because I hadn’t worked in chess and I wasn’t sure about working with a 17-year-old at the time.

“But very soon into my first conversation with Gukesh, I realised he was someone special and I was quite excited about the possibility of working with a chess player and a leader to a world championship,” Upton signed off.