00:00Welcome to the FIDE World Championship 2024.
00:04After a rousing welcome to introduce the game, it's down to the serious stuff and calm inside the players' cube.
00:11This has been billed as a battle between Asian giants.
00:1532-year-old Ding Li Ren of China comes into the challenge in patchy form.
00:20His opponent, Gukesh Domaraju from India, is a rising star playing with the maturity of someone well beyond his years.
00:28Fans from back home that have travelled to Singapore are bullish about his chances.
00:33You know, in our country, these days chess is flowing in the veins and arteries of an entire generation of school-going children.
00:40They are just enjoying chess like anything and following it.
00:43And Gukesh is a big hero. He's just a teenager and he's a star in our country.
00:47Should he prevail, Gukesh would become the youngest classical world champion ever.
00:53The winner will walk away with a prize of two and a half million dollars.
00:57I think it's super exciting. And of course, it's the richest tournament in the world, so lots of excitement.
01:02Chess has enjoyed considerable growth in recent years.
01:06Many people turn to the game in particular during the COVID-19 pandemic.
01:10But the surge in the number of people playing chess has mainly been online.
01:15The world's biggest chess platform, chess.com, now boasts 190 million users worldwide.
01:23That's compared to about 51 million at the start of 2020.
01:27The boom in online chess has raised questions over the championship format and whether it still represents the pinnacle of the sport.
01:35Added to that, the absence of Magnus Carlsen looms large over this event.
01:40The Norwegian master vacated the world championship title in 2022 after dominating for over a decade.
01:47Some say this is no longer a match for the title of the best player in the world.
01:53But I still think that there's an appeal to become the world chess champion.
01:56It is very unclear what's going to happen if Magnus plays Gukesh right now, I would say, or with Ding.
02:02Actually, it's super unclear.
02:05But, you know, there's still this hunger for the top young chess players to one day to become the world chess champion.
02:12So I don't see that going away. I don't see the prestige of that being sort of diluted over time.
02:18Still, the championship clash in Singapore brings plenty of buzz.
02:22And no matter who wins, the best of 14 games event will surely generate more interest in the sport in the massive markets of India and China.
02:32Patrick Fock, CGTN, Singapore.
