Nervous time management and grueling tactics: defending champion Ding Liren
Photo: imago/Then Chih Wey
When Ding Liren doesn’t know what to do next, he moves in completely different directions. His shoulders move back and forth, his hands press down on his thighs, his upper body slowly rocks. And the Chinese always looks up to find out what his opponent is thinking. After game eight at this World Chess Championship, he was asked how it felt to play for the title in Singapore. In his gentle voice he answers: “It’s torture above all else.” As he did so, he stroked his hand absently over his cheek.
The suffering will continue for a while, after the ninth game on Thursday it is still a draw between the Chinese and the stoic math genius Dommaraju Gukesh from India. They will play a maximum of fourteen classic games, in the following time format: 120 minutes until move 40, then another 30 minutes plus 30 seconds per move. For a win you get one point, for a draw everyone gets half a point. The winner is whoever reaches 7.5 points the fastest. If the score remains equal until the end, a tiebreak in the faster format will decide between victory and defeat.
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It is not unlikely that it will come to this. Defending champion Ding Liren has indeed suffered in recent games – far more than the chess world had expected. But he also put a lot of effort into the tournament. After his spectacular win with black in the first game, a rather boring draw in the second and a crushing defeat in the third, Ding Liren then had at least one, if not decisively advantageous, at least promising position on the board four times. But then he chose the bailout option each time instead of risking too much – and so took the draws with him.
This progression is also due to the fact that until game six, the accuracy of the moves of both opponents was the highest measured so far at a world championship. That changed from game seven onwards, when Gukesh surprised his opponent with a completely new variation in the Grünfeld defense and had Ding Liren on the verge of defeat for large parts of the game. In almost every situation discussed in the subsequent press conference, the Chinese sighed and said he had the feeling that his position was “completely hopeless.”
But Ding Liren found a way out of the dark forest into which Gukesh had led him – and achieved a draw that must have felt psychologically like a victory. The Indian also dominated the action for a long time in game eight. From the opening he was much better and had two connected passed pawns on the queenside, but then overlooked a small, subtle queenside maneuver that actually saved Ding Liren’s position.
For the defending champion, every game of this World Cup match has been a tightrope walk so far because his time management is nerve-wracking, even for neutral spectators. He regularly spends a quarter of an hour on positions that seem obvious, then gets into trouble and has to find moves in almost hopeless situations within a few minutes or even seconds with computer-like precision that can somehow save him.
The elegant but unspectacular ninth game, in which both Catalan players couldn’t hurt each other, had a different outcome on Thursday. Ding Liren’s general calculation seems to be not to necessarily play to win, but rather to stay in the match as long as possible in order to increase the psychological pressure on the opponent. Because Gukesh came to Singapore as the big favorite – and with every draw he falls slightly below expectations. And these are big, in India he is already something of a pop star.
If the match stays even until the end and goes into a tiebreak, Ding Liren would probably be the favorite: As strong as Gukesh is with his perhaps unique calculation skills in classical chess, he is not among the absolute world leaders in faster formats.
Meanwhile, discussions continue as to what this World Cup will be like if the strongest player doesn’t win the title in the end. But given how the match has gone so far, this question is unnecessary. The mode develops a tension that other formats cannot match – and that a player like Ding Liren sees as torture. However, there is a decent compensation for the suffering with a prize money of 2.5 million dollars.
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