But such is the nature of the world chess championship that it had struck fear even into the psyche of one of the most menacing players to play the sport. The world was seeing Carlsen sweat!

“I had a long time to prepare for that first world championship. I prepared a lot! But it scared me to go through all of Anand’s games from the past,” Carlsen recollected many years later.

The world No. 1 had spent months preparing for this moment, his first royal rumble of the world chess championship. And in two games that nonchalant confidence that is Carlsen’s persona was starting to crack. Why? Because he had tried his luck with an offbeat line in the first game with white pieces hoping it would give him an advantage by catching Anand off guard. The Indian brushed that line aside with a few lazy gestures of his hand. The game ended in a draw. But it was enough to make Carlsen question his months-long preparation.

It is this crucible of the unknown that the 18-year-old challenger Gukesh will find himself in when he takes on the world champion Ding Liren in Singapore. It is a battle that could last three weeks.

Ding, of course, has already experienced the pressure of playing in the world chess championship for the first time a year back. And he survived to tell the tale. He admitted to being depressed before and during the game. Not just playing the world championship, winning it can also take a toll. Ding needed a complete break for many months after becoming the 17th world champion. His self confidence is still recovering from the rigours a grandmaster puts himself through to fight for the crown.

As Carlsen remarked earlier this month while talking about Ding Liren: “The World Chess Championship is a very tough thing. It’s one thing to prepare for the world championship. But I don’t think you can quite prepare for the intensity of the championship without actually playing it. A lot of people find it tough, both to play but also to recover. What I think happened with him is that Ding Liren has not completely recovered from that World Championship yet.”

Henrik Carlsen, who has been his son’s manager and closest confidant, points at those moments when his son dropped pieces on the board to illustrate why players can spend months huddled with a team of seconds preparing to play 14 games against the same opponent, but the grand stage of the world chess championship still throws surprises at you that you haven’t thought of.

“The team around Magnus, even we didn’t sleep as much as we used to. Magnus was quite nervous. That’s, of course, a key element in a World Chess Championship match. When you play your first game in your first World Chess Championship match, you cannot be prepared, basically! There’s no way to prepare properly for that. Magnus struggled in his first game. A couple of times, he lost his pieces. He was trembling, basically, in the second game,” the senior Carlsen recollected in a video for Take Take Take recently.

“But once he survived the third game, Magnus put his leg above the other, leaned back, and kind of said to Anand, ‘okay, you got your chance. You didn’t take it. Now it’s my turn’.”

Viswanathan Anand’s first brush with world chess championship

Anand, meanwhile, too has some tales of his first time competing for the world chess championship against Anatoly Karpov in 1998.

“Almost everyday, you’ll have moments of doubt. You’ll have moments when you think things are going to go great. Then you’ll ask yourself, are these scenarios of things going well, are they even remotely realistic? Then your opponent will morph into all sorts of things that he’s not,” chuckled Anand in an interview with The Indian Express recently.

“You’re constantly duelling with your thoughts. You will panic. There’s something about the stakes that makes you want to get the world championship match over with. That itself is a dangerous attitude,” said Anand.

Anand added that moments of doubt accompanied him in every world championship battle, with each subsequent time he got into the ring, the thoughts and the pressure started to feel “normal”.

When Gukesh plays in his first world chess championship in a few days’ time, it’s likely that he might walk into battle with a slight air of invincibility. That’s precisely what Garry Kasparov felt when he, as a 21-year-old, fought Karpov for the title in 1984. Karpov by that stage had been champion for a decade. Kasparov was a prodigy who was convinced of his own bullet-proof invincibility.

Then, reality came knocking. In the span of a few days, Kasparov had lost four games and won none. His ego bruised, he and his team chose to opt for an conservative approach, which led to 17 consecutive draws.

That world chess championship was eventually called off with no winner in sight after five months of Karpov and Kasparov duelling. Kasparov later remarked that he and his team had spent so much time trying to guess what Karpov was going to do, that Kasparov started to feel he was mutating into Karpov himself.

So far in his career, Gukesh has been unflappable in the face of the biggest challenges. But in the heat of a world chess championship battle where Carlsen has trembled and Anand has questioned himself and Kasparov had his ego humbled, how will the 18-year-old first-timer manage?

“Just have to get through game one. That’s the challenge. Then you’re fine,” advised Henrik Carlsen.