Gukesh Dommaraju: he isn’t the best but can get there

“Gukesh is a bit of a mystery to me. It’s weird to have somebody who’s unbelievably better at classical than rapid. He calculates non-stop, very well, and he often considers stuff I didn’t even think about. But in rapid and blitz, sometimes it looks as though this guy doesn’t have the intuition to find good moves quickly, and he makes certain strange positional decisions because he doesn’t have a positional filter.”
Magnus Carlsen’s assessment of the new world chess champion, Gukesh Dommaraju, before this match started, is interesting, to say the least. It was an opinion the man Gukesh dethroned, Ding Liren, probably shared. Throughout the match, Ding looked to be playing cautiously to take it to rapid tiebreaks.