Saint Louis 2019. Ding Liren did one thing that nobody had achieved shortly – defeat Magnus Carlsen within the tie-break playoff of a serious event. A primary since 2007. In a sit-down interview with HT final week, Carlsen used a verb he sparingly does for any fellow chess participant. “Ding is someone I massively respected… even feared,” Carlsen stated.
Reigning world champion Ding Liren of China. (AP)
The “feared” Ding hasn’t been seen shortly. The 32-year-old Chinese language GM will face 18-year-old Gukesh within the World Championship match, beginning on Monday. His crown is on the road – the one piece of carry-on Gukesh desires to take again to India from Singapore. As for Ding, virtually by no means has a defending world champion appeared this susceptible heading right into a title match. Who’s to say although which model of him will present up or if he even desires the title sufficient a second time round?
Gukesh and his group have within the run-up to this match usually spoken of getting ready for “Ding at his best”. The pre-pandemic Ding – extraordinarily well-rounded, inventive, correct, a participant with no actual weaknesses so to talk and who could have maybe troubled Carlsen had he made the 2021 title match – seems to have vanished. Within the interval between August 2017 and November 2018, he had a exceptional 100-game unbeaten streak in classical chess. Had issues been completely different and life not thrown him a curveball, Ding at his peak could have been a fairly scary man to go up in opposition to in a match.
“Ding is exactly the kind of a player who you want to see competing in a World Championship match,” Peter Svidler, commentator and coach to R Praggnanandhaa, weighs in. “It’s just so unfortunate the way things turned out for him. I feel spending the COVID years in China where lockdowns were an actual thing, was just incredibly difficult on him,” the Russian GM tells HT, “And when the period was over, he was just a different player.”
For Levon Aronian, who gained his second World Cup in 2017 after it got here all the way down to a tie-break battle between him and Ding, the Chinese language GM has at all times been one thing of a thriller. “I’ve never quite understood Ding…it’s probably why I’ve never been able to beat him in classical chess. He beat me thrice.”
“I was under this impression and it’s a thing someone who has known him well shared with me – that at some point he’s going to collapse. …But the guy just never collapsed,” Aronian tells HT.
A light-mannered introvert with a love for Raymond Carver and Haruki Murakami’s works, Ding comes from the coastal metropolis of Wenzhou, famend because the cradle of mathematicians in China and because the birthplace of the nation’s panorama poetry. “This match reflects the deepness (sic) of my soul,” Ding provided in poetic summation proper after he gained the world title in 2023 in opposition to Ian Nepomniachtchi. A match during which he was by no means as soon as within the lead by way of the 14-game classical affair.
In the course of the course of the match, Ding spoke about struggling along with his thoughts and battling despair for the primary time publicly. He was already a little bit of a damaged man when he arrived for that battle. Turning world champion maybe solely made it worse. “After I won the title, my passion for chess dropped a lot,” Ding advised HT final June.
He was absent from the circuit for months after turning into world champion, solely making his first main classical look at Wijk Aan Zee in January 2024. It’s the place he defeated Gukesh. The Indian is but to beat him in classical chess.
Ding spoke to HT in the midst of the Norway Chess event the place he was struggling, showing tentative and missing in confidence. His nervous, involuntary physique actions on the board, was being talked about by fellow gamers. “I’m here as if I’m not here,” he stated. A participant with the soul of a poet. It’s in all probability what makes his plight tougher to look at.
He doesn’t thoughts the ‘underdog’ tag, has known as Gukesh the ‘favourite’ and spoken of worrying about shedding badly. “Ding is just being honest,” five-time world champion Viswanathan Anand tells HT, “He’s probably reached a stage where he thinks what’s the point of pretending? It probably feels good for him as well. It takes off a lot of pressure.”
Ding is his nation’s first male world chess champion. China has six ladies’s chess champions. Wenzhou, other than poets and storytellers, can also be recognized for its chess, a sport as soon as banned in China. The State’s angle modified through the years and the Seventies ‘Big Dragon’ challenge to develop chess in Asia had its affect. In 1995, Wenzhou famously hosted a match between Viktor Korchnoi and China’s first ladies’s world chess champion, Xie Jun. It might have had a task to play in Ding becoming a member of a chess membership.
“At this moment, Ding is much harder to understand than Gukesh,” says Aronian. “He appears to be having trouble focusing to his fullest ability so it’s possible that in the earlier tournaments, he didn’t want to stress himself out. Basically save up energy for the match. If that’s the case, he can still be dangerous.”
Svidler too is hoping for a aggressive Ding to indicate up for the match. However he, like most others, isn’t actually holding his breath.
“At this point, it looks like it will take nothing short of a miracle for a turnaround. It’s heartbreaking. Ding was such a tremendous player and I was a huge fan… I still am a huge fan.”