17-year-old Gukesh wins the Candidates, becomes youngest ever Chess World Championship challenger

This is really, really impressive. Top-level chess is undergoing a kind of changing of the guard, with this Candidates featuring three players aged 17-20 and five in their late twenties and thirties. The two other youngsters, Alireza Firouzja (20) and Praggnanandhaa (18) ended near the bottom of the table, but Gukesh emerges on top.

With Magnus Carlsen declining to defend his title, Ding Liren beat Ian Nepomniachtchi to become the new champ. But since becoming World Champion, he hasn't played much and hasn't looked good when he did. Before this tournament I thought that whoever wins would be a favorite given Ding's recent form. I didn't expect the youngest Candidate to win, though. By some accounts winning the Candidates is harder than actually winning the WC match, at least if your opponent's name isn't Magnus Carlsen. But on the other hand, Gukesh is still really young. He has the potential to be the youngest ever world champion by a large margin (Kasparov and Carlsen were both 22). But playing a 14-game match against an opponent who's specifically prepared against you with a team of seconds for months is a different ballgame.

Vishy Anand has to be proud. He more or less single-handedly started the Indian chess boom. He was India's first grandmaster and its first (and only) world champion. Now they've had two young players in the Candidates, one of them winning the whole thing, and they're both from Chennai, Anand's hometown. And they have two more players in the top 10 junior rankings.

About Gukesh's name: his name is Dommaraju Gukesh, where Dommaraju is the family name and Gukesh the given name. But as I understand it, in his culture the given name is given priority, even used in formal settings, and the family name is often abbreviated to a single letter. So he's most frequently referred to as Gukesh D or simply Gukesh in English. The same is true of Viswanathan Anand, where in his case Anand is the given name and Viswanathan is his father's name, so he should be referred to as Anand, although in his case he's stated that the doesn't mind the English nickname "Vishy". I didn't think I'd ever need to learn about South Indian naming conventions but apparently that's what a chess interest does to you.