The year Gukesh was asked to put the engine away

By the time Dommaraju Gukesh became world chess champion in December 2024, at the age of eighteen, most of the coaching decisions that shaped him had been made long before anyone outside Chennai was watching. The most consequential of them was made when he was eleven, in a small training room, by a grandmaster called Vishnu Prasanna. It was, on the surface, a decision to remove a tool. In practice it was a decision about what a young mind should be allowed to feel.

Chess prodigies, by the time Gukesh started serious training, were being raised alongside chess engines. The engine tells you the truth of a position in seconds. It ranks the top three moves, gives you an evaluation to two decimal places, and shows you why the beautiful sacrifice you were considering is a losing blunder. For a talented eleven year old, an engine is intoxicating. It is also, if you let it, a way of never learning to think for yourself.

The experiment

Prasanna asked Gukesh, and Gukesh's parents, to consider a small experiment. Until his rating reached a certain threshold, he would prepare his openings without checking them against an engine. He would analyse his own games afterwards without an engine. He and his coach would sit with the positions, argue about them, get things wrong, and only later, at a much higher level, invite the machine back in.

Prasanna has said in interviews that he suggested a version of the idea to the parents of several talented children around Chennai. Only the Gukesh family agreed. Everyone else, understandably, thought it was madness. Their sons were competing against opponents who trained with the strongest engines in the world. Removing that tool sounded like sending a child into a knife fight with a wooden spoon.

What Prasanna was reaching for was quieter than it sounded. He was trying to build, at the age when it is easiest to build, a certain kind of relationship between Gukesh and the board. If you always know the machine will tell you the answer at the end, you develop a particular listening posture. You wait to be corrected. You do not fully trust your own picture of the position because you know it is provisional. In a game, at the board, when the clock is ticking and there is no engine, that listening posture is exactly what fails you.

What it built

Gukesh eventually crossed the 2500 rating threshold and, at that point, the engine was allowed back in. By then something had already been set. In the years that followed, his coaches and second team would remark on his calmness at the board and on the precision of his calculation. They also noted his willingness to trust an assessment of a position even when a modern engine did not initially agree. He had learned to sit with a position for a long time without needing an oracle to end the discomfort.

The other thing Prasanna noticed early was less about chess and more about the boy. Where other children at the training group joked their way through blitz games, Gukesh was serious about even the shortest game. He wanted to know why something worked, not merely that it did. Prasanna decided, with a coach's instinct that is easier to describe after the fact than in the moment, that this seriousness was worth protecting. If he handed the boy the engine too early, the seriousness would migrate. It would become seriousness about matching the engine, rather than seriousness about the position.

The long instrument

It is tempting to tell this story as a triumph of coaching intuition. The truer version, and the more useful one for anyone teaching a young person anything, is quieter. Prasanna made a decision to slow a talented child down at exactly the age when the whole culture around him was speeding him up. He did it for years, on a bet that the shape being built underneath was worth more than the shortcut being refused. He was working on a timescale that no monthly rating report would have rewarded.

That is the part of the story that translates. Few coaches will ever coach a world champion. Almost all of them, at some point, will have to decide between the tool that would make this week easier and the habit that would make the next ten years better. The decision is almost never obvious in the moment. It only shows up, in retrospect, in the calmness of an eighteen year old sitting across the board from the reigning world champion in Singapore.

Prasanna, for his part, has been generous in describing what he did as an experiment, not a formula. He noticed something about the child in front of him and adjusted the training to fit. That is the whole craft. The engine, in the end, was a stand in for a bigger question every private coach has to answer more or less alone. What does this person need to become the one who can hold their own weight, later, without me in the room.