‘Unexplainable’ blunder, immediate resignation: Gukesh defeated by old foe Nodirbek Abdusattorov at Tata Steel Chess tournament

Gukesh Dommaraju

The world champion suffered his first defeat of the year at the Tata Steel tournament at the hands of Abdusattorov, thanks to a one-move blunder in the sixth round clash.

For almost five minutes, Gukesh Dommaraju could not bear to look either at the board or his opponent, Nodirbek Abdusattorov. He changed his posture over 15 times in that duration, each position displaying a different degree of torment with his hand covering his face. In the previous five rounds of the Tata Steel Chess tournament, Gukesh has been keen to chat with his opponents, usually being the one to initiate a conversation with the opponent to try and analyze the game and pick their mind. Today, no words came out of his mouth when Abdusattorov tried more than once to talk to him and analyse the game.

It was that sort of a morale-bruising result that stings for a long time. The world champion suffered his first defeat of the year at the Tata Steel tournament at the hands of Abdusattorov, thanks to a one-move blunder in the sixth round clash. Gukesh was shell-shocked at himself for making the move and appeared to realise that he had made a fatal error a second after making it. He immediately resigned after Abdusattorov’s response.

Meanwhile, Friday saw the other three Indians in the masters section—R Praggnanandhaa, Arjun Erigaisi and Aravindh Chitambaram—play out draws.

Gukesh’s fatal error was pushing his rook ahead by a square from g6 to g5, which in an online game would have felt like a mouse slip. After all, it left his pawn on f6 undefended from the prowling white queen on f5. Even Abdusattorov looked puzzled by the move when it happened, but quickly capitalised on the opponent’s error to claim the pawn and in the process fork Gukesh’s king and rook.

“I feel very sorry for him. It’s a terrible feeling. I’ve done it myself many times. So it’s an absolutely horrible feeling,” a sympathetic Abdusattorov said in the interview after his win. “This game was pretty much normal. At some point I think he was getting excited and he was obviously trying to push but I sort of controlled the margin. I thought I had a good margin to draw and at the end he was getting low on time and he felt nervous and he blundered horribly.”

“Honestly, it’s very hard to recover from a game like this. Really hard,” said IM Soumya Swaminathan on the Chessbase India live stream. “This was just a lapse of concentration.”

Gukesh sat rooted at his seat long after the defeat, unable to process how he had blundered away an equal-ish position. What was harder to swallow was that the defeat came against Abdusattorov, who he had also lost to at the 2022 Chennai Olympiad, which had cost the young Indian team a much-deserved gold medal.

This was Gukesh’s first defeat at Wijk aan Zee, in what is the world champion’s first classical tournament of 2026, a year where he will defend his world championship crown in November-December. Gukesh had played out four draws in a row at the start of the tournament before winning his first game against Czech Republic’s Thai Dai Van Nguyen. That win had come just before Thursday’s rest day.