'Gukesh needs to fight habit of calculation,' says coach after torrid run

India's Gukesh Dommaraju faced a horrid run of form at the 2025 Freestyle Chess Grand Slam in Weissenhaus, finishing the tournament winless.

The recently crowned world champion barely made it out of the round robin stage, taking the eighth and final spot in the knockout stages.

He then suffered losses to eventual runner-up Fabiano Caruana in the quarter-finals, Hikaru Nakamura in the semi-finals, and Alireza Firouzja in the seventh-place play-off to finish eighth in the competition.

Earlier in the tournament, Nakamura had attributed Gukesh's struggles in the tournament to the lack of intuition.  

A habitual calculator

"I think it's not a matter of developing intuition but rather fighting the habit of calculation," Grzegorz Gajewski, Gukesh's trainer, told Chessbase India after his disappointing run.

"When you calculate so well, it becomes a habit. You can't just make a move and say okay I am defending the pawn because immediately the opponent's move also come to your mind and you start calculating. 

"He (Gukesh) does it automatically. He is simply too good of a calculator to not do this," the coach observed further.

Gajewski, a Polish Grandmaster, stressed that it is not that easy to calculate in freestyle chess, thanks to the lack of literature and in-depth analysis in the variant.

'Needs to improve intuition'

In Freestyle Chess, also known as Chess 960 or Fischer Random, the major and minor pieces are placed randomly over the board instead of the set rules.

The players are revealed the position they will play on the board just minutes before the start of the match, leaving them with virtually no time to prepare theoretically for any given position.

"In 960, calculation can be very misleading because you have to be careful about which moves you are calculating," said Gajewski.

"So, yes, he [Gukesh] needs to improve his intuition. By intuition, I mean chess 960 intuition because moves that intuitively seem fine in classical chess are just pure mistakes in 960," he added.