After becoming the youngest ever world chess champion at the end of 2024, 2025 has been a challenging year for Jokesh Domaraju. His recent third-round exit from the World Cup capped a difficult year, with poor results in major competitions subsequently calling into question his status as world champion.
His coach, Grzegorz Gajewski, isn’t worried yet. Pointing to Jokic’s age, he says that sometimes, you need to accept the contradictions that come with being a teenager in elite sport. After all, earlier this year, he only lost the Tata Steel Masters title to R Praggnanandhaa in draws, pushing Magnus Carlsen all the way in a Norwegian chess event. He beat Carlsen during that event in Stavanger, and then again in rapid chess at a Grand Chess Tour event in Zagreb.
But amid these positives, the two biggest events of the year were failures. The FIDE Grand Swiss Championship, where he finished 41st, and the FIDE World Cup ended with terrible results for Gokic. He has struggled in some other classic events as well – the Sinquefield Cup and the Superbet Chess Classic. This, combined with Gokic’s poor performance in the freestyle chess round, and his continued struggles with the faster time controls, means that 2025 has, by all accounts, been a bad year for the world champion.
In an exclusive conversation with ESPN, Gajewski points out how winning a world title has necessitated a reset from Gukesh. “When you work your whole life for something, and then you get it, you have to find new motivation,” Gajewski says. “It can be difficult for someone so young.”
However, the wider chess world will not see and take notice of Omar Gökis. For them, he is the world champion, and they have no reason to compromise to the world champion. He must compete for every title, in every format, in every time trial. This is a sport that is very accustomed to seeing its world champion as close to perfection as champions of the sport can get, and that is what it expects from every future world champion as well. It may seem unfair, but this is the world Gokish is dealing with now.
Gajewski, for example, says he is baffled by some doubts about his ward’s world champion status. “Does he deserve the World Championship? Of course he does, because he won it,” Gajewski says, while also saying he thinks outside hype hasn’t affected Jokic much so far.
The likes of former world champions Garry Kasparov and Magnus Carlsen have been vocal in their criticism this year, with the former continuing to say that the world championship crown does not appear to be resting on Gukic’s head as it has been with the likes of him, Vladimir Kramnik or Carlsen.
Now, is Gokic in Kasparov’s or Carlsen’s world yet? No, and he would be the first to laugh at such a statement. He has a long way to go, he knows that, and his team knows that.
The last part could be the key. Gajewski says the mistakes that led to missed tournaments this year are not unusual for Jokic. From a chess perspective, he says he knows what the mistakes are but has not elaborated – which is understandable with a future title defense.
However, one of the most important learnings that Gajewski talked about was choosing how much chess you want to play, and how many different styles and variations. This year, Gokisch played in the Free Chess Tour, the Grand Chess Tour, big invitational classic tournaments like Tata Steel and Norwegian Chess, and some high-level exhibition tournaments as well. In 2026, Jokic’s team is set to be more selective in choosing which tournaments it participates in.
The challenge here is to balance the opportunities to enhance the champion’s chess education with the need for a period of rest and reset. For example, last month’s Clutch Chess event in the US, where Jokic played against Carlsen, Hikaru Nakamura and Fabiano Caruana, was too good an opportunity to turn down because how many times can you play the three best players in the world in the same tournament? But would a break have made him better in that period?
These are the questions his team faces, as they admit his reign so far has been difficult. For now, they are focused on laying the building blocks for him to defend his title next year, where the focus will continue to be on classical chess – even if they continue to put in a big effort at big tournaments in other formats, such as the World Rapid and Blitz Championships in Doha next month.
Jokic said last year after being crowned champion that he was not the best player in the world, and this is what he wanted to become. On the evidence of 2025, he is far from being the best player in the world now than he was then. But in 2026, he has the opportunity to correct this, by learning the right lessons from 2025.
Defending his World Championship title may not banish all questions about his outstanding chess ability, but there will certainly be much less noise about whether he deserves to take the crown. Logically speaking, how could anyone question the legitimacy of a back-to-back world champion?
Grzegorz Gajewski and Gukesh Dommaraju have been through it once, and both are fully committed to doing it again, in a bid to retain the crown they memorably won in Singapore last year.
