Is there such a thing as the World Championship crown weighing too heavily on its holders?
Few people know that feeling better than Viswanathan Anand, who has been world champion five times, and he had no hesitation in saying that the crown can weigh heavily. Anand cannot pinpoint an exact reason for it, but he says everyone just struggles to maintain the consistency that made them world champion.
Gukesh Dommaraju has found that out in the couple of years since he became champion: he hasn't won a single tournament, and his performances have kept going downhill, to a state of alarm ahead of the defence of his title against Javokhir Sindarov in Geneva later this year.
Anand, speaking to ESPN recently, said that he has been in regular contact with Gukesh, but wouldn't go into further detail on whether he had a specific role in Gukesh's team for the world championship match. What have conversations in that regular contact been about? Just sharing his own experiences, and how he dealt with troughs in his career. "I think whenever a topic comes up, I would tell them that this is how I felt. Not, 'this is what you should do'," he said.
"What Gukesh is experiencing, I've experienced a couple of times. You have no idea why the world refuses to work like it used to. You're working as hard as you think. You want it, you think, you think. But the world is just not bending in like it used to. The only thing I could tell him is that it comes with the territory."
Of course, Gukesh is younger now than Anand was when he experienced those feelings, Anand was never world champion at 18. But if anyone can help Gukesh deal with them, it's the great man.
Anand is confident that it is just a matter of a result or two that makes Gukesh feel good again. He refers to the time when he would play in a wider variety of tournaments, playing a lot of rapid tournaments in those periods, where he'd win one of them, and he'd start feeling good about his chess again.
It is that kind of result that Gukesh needs at this point, Anand argues, and it's not even a tournament win. It could just be a matter of one game here or there. The example of R Praggnanandhaa's 2026 stands out. He has won the Norway Chess tournament, the St. Louis Rapid & Blitz, and the Grand Chess Tour finals in the space of a few months. Anand called him the best player in the world right now but added that four rounds before the end of Norway Chess, no one was even thinking about such a statement. Praggnanandhaa was last in the standings and had to pull off four classical wins in a row to win that tournament.
Form is temporary, it flips on a whim. The upcoming Olympiad is a final opportunity for Gukesh to build some confidence before the world championship match and that is a precarious position to be in, but Anand has been through that too.
Before his world championship match in 2012 against Boris Gelfand, Anand had admitted to not being in a good place with his chess. He thought he was entering the twilight of his career: the creativity had gone missing, he wrote in his book Mindmaster. Then after six draws, he lost game seven too. "I tell myself, it's my career over and all that. And then, I come the next morning, see my team. And that was the way I came out of it," he said. He won that game the next day, leveled the match, and then won it in rapid tie-breaks for his fifth world title.
"It happened, I'm fortunate. Next year (against Magnus Carlsen in Chennai), it didn't happen. And that's how it is. So, I just turned up. And in fact, every tournament is in fact a fresh start. It's only with hindsight that we plug it into the same pattern. Otherwise, every tournament is a fresh start," he said.
That one win, somehow, anyhow, is all Gukesh needs, Anand argues. "Self-deception is what we are good at," he said. "Some unexpected gift in a tournament is all I need. Because in my mind, I'm not playing badly because I deserve to. In my mind, the universe is not cooperating. And then when I get lucky, I think, yeah, finally it is how it should be."
One important thing for Gukesh, Anand says, is to not look backwards. "What I did was to accept at some point, there's no point trying to understand what's happening. We try to understand what's happening. Make cause and effect"
But that could be a harmful path, because there is no guarantee that things will turn around, Anand says, with the implication being that it could potentially lead one down to a worse space than they were already in.
"I think the strength is there. It couldn't have gone away. The strength is there. But something in the state of mind."
As Gukesh goes to Samarkand later this month for India's defence of their Olympiad crown, that's what he will look to find - that strength, which is still there, that better state of mind, potentially that one game, one result that makes him feel good about his chess again.