Meet Kevin Goh: the Gukesh victim who bid for world chess’ biggest match Premium

Kevin Goh Wei Ming's journey from playing against D. Gukesh to hosting the World Chess Championship in Singapore.

Kevin Goh Wei Ming can now claim that he played a role in the career of D. Gukesh, who became the youngest World chess champion in history on Thursday. It was after beating Goh in a tournament in Bangkok in 2018 that the Chennai lad, who won the World title after defeating Ding Liren in Singapore, secured his first Grandmaster norm. Ironically, the loss had spoiled Goh’s hopes of the final GM norm. He wasn’t done yet. As Singapore Chess Federation CEO, Goh led Singapore’s bid for hosting the World Championship, which became a resounding success. Excerpts from an interview with Grandmaster Goh:

So when did you think of bidding for the World Championship?

It was just an idea that I thought of. And then I was discussing with a couple of friends — they don’t really want to be named, and they were like, yes, you should. So I was speaking with some chess fans and they were like, ‘Dude, you should do this, man. It is the perfect thing to do.’ And we are neutral, you know, there are all these geopolitical situations. We are a multi-racial country, we have many people of Indian and Chinese origins.

What made you bid for it?

First of all, I am a chess fan. I would love chess to be played in my country. But aside from my selfish reasons, I think that there are a lot of positive narratives for Singaporeans in general. We were confident of our bid because of the geopolitical thing, for one thing, and a neutral country. There were many discussions behind the scenes with FIDE, with my team, with my government.

The government was very supportive. Everyone was proud that we could bring the prestige of this event to Singapore. There were some downsides about bidding, too. What if the event turns out to be a disaster, organisational lapses could happen. What if the glass [wall] collapsed in the middle of the match? What if we couldn’t handle the fans?

The fans, in fact, responded very well to the event, and the side-events, such as the simultaneous displays with some of the legends in the game, proved to be pretty popular.