Fabiano Caruana has explained D Gukesh’s costly blunder at the Tata Steel Chess tournament, calling it a rare case of chess blindness. He also addressed why such mistakes can happen even to world champions.
Italian-American chess grandmaster Fabiano Caruana has described world champion
D Gukesh’s shocking blunder at the ongoing Tata Steel Chess tournament in Wijk aan Zee as a case of “chess blindness”, saying such mistakes almost never happen to anyone.
Caruana, who is one of the notable absentees from this year’s Tata Steel Chess Masters, spoke about the incident on his C-Squared Podcast, where he analysed Gukesh’s round 6 loss to
Nodirbek Abdusattorov. The American grandmaster said the blunder was a rare lapse and not a sign of poor form or loss of concentration.
The 19-year-old Gukesh has come under the spotlight at the ongoing tournament after suffering back-to-back defeats and moving out of title contention. The loss to Abdusattorov was particularly painful, as the game ended immediately after he resigned following a blunder that would have cost him a rook and a pawn.
Gukesh’s body language after that defeat showed how deeply the mistake affected him. He sat silently at the board for several minutes even as Abdusattorov tried to analyse the position. Later, Gukesh spent some alone time in the press room, trying to process what had happened.
Gukesh makes a huge blunder and has to resign on the spot against Abdusattorov! 🤯 https://t.co/9swvI7qPTI pic.twitter.com/AbKfcBCRIz
— chess24 (@chess24com) January 23, 2026
Caruana explains Gukesh’s blunder
Explaining the blunder, Caruana said, “He just missed Queen f6. He thought exf6, Queen f6, and I guess evaluated it as kind of equal. He just missed Queen f6. How it happens, I don’t know. Of course, shocking blunders happen; it’s just visualization, right? He just didn’t see that Queen f6 was a possible move.”
“I don’t really know what causes it. This is probably a neurological question—what causes a lapse of pattern recognition where you either instantly see Queen f6 or you somehow don’t? This is more about how the brain works because chess blindness happens in different ways at different times. It usually doesn’t happen like this, but I’ve put pieces on en prise (in a position to be taken) before,” he added.
According to Caruana, this was not about losing focus. He described it as an accident caused by a sudden lapse in pattern recognition, something he called “chess blindness”. Caruana also added that every top player has experienced similar moments in their career that sometimes go unnoticed.
“I just think chess blindness can hit you at any moment, and some people are less susceptible to it than others. We can speculate on who’s more or less susceptible, but definitely, some people are very good at avoiding blunders. Now, this rarely happens to Gukesh – maybe it happens one in a hundred times – whereas maybe for someone like Vincent Keymer, it happens zero out of a hundred times. I wouldn’t even say this is losing concentration; this is just an accident striking,” he said.
“But of course, accidents can be costly, and it was a very costly accident. I’ve made blunders that happened to be insignificant; sometimes you miss something super obvious, but luckily it’s not crucial. This one just happened to be dramatic, especially in its presentation, because he just gives away a rook and a pawn with check in one move,” Caruana added.
Gukesh’s struggles did not end there. In round 9 against Matthias Bluebaum, the Indian found himself in a worse position straight out of the opening and was unable to recover, eventually resigning after 37 moves. In round 12 against Hans Niemann, Gukesh built a strong position and held an advantage for a long time before making another costly knight blunder on move 41 that saw the game end in a draw.
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