Liren Ding was world champion on April 30, 2023 in epic fashion, playing like a kamikaze in the quick tiebreaker with the Russian Ian Niepómniashi. This Tuesday he acted like a suicide again, in the 7th game of the World Cup in Singapore, when he had a very solid defense. And he was lost, but his rival, the 18-year-old Indian Dommaraju Gukesh, was not precise, and the fight ended in a draw after five and a half electrifying hours. With the score tied (3.5-3.5) with seven games remaining, Ding will have the initiative for the white pieces in four of them.
It was a critical day for Ding, with the black pieces. If he crossed the halfway point of the duel ensuring that Gukesh could not win this time with white either, the horizon would be clear for the Chinese. The main reason for this optimism would be that Ding knows himself better than Gukesh in the fast modalities, and therefore would be comfortable if he had to play for the title again in the accelerated tiebreaker, as he did against Niepómniashi a year and a half ago.
Obviously, the applicant and his team were very aware of all this. So Gukesh applied a new idea very early, on his seventh launch. Ding spent almost half an hour searching for a way to remove his rival from his poisonous laboratory preparations, while maintaining an acceptable position.
And he achieved it, with very precise maneuvers, but at the cost of the clock being a third important player from a very early phase of the fight. Objectively—according to inhuman chess players who calculate millions of moves per second—the position was balanced after 20 moves. But with an important nuance: Ding had only 20 minutes to reach the fortieth, compared to Gukesh’s 50.
And if that were not enough tension, the Chinese made a high-risk decision: move the queen away from his king’s defense to eat a pawn at the other end of the board. That maneuver was not forced—he had much more conservative, and good, defensive strategies; Therefore, the champion dived into a pool where genius and folly swam together.
And the predictable thing happened when a genius is in poor shape: Ding did not find the very exact plays that would have justified his kamikaze attitude, and he was left in a very inferior position, very appropriate for his rival’s enormous calculation capacity and with only 16 minutes for 15 movements.
But everything indicated that he was going to be saved, basically because Gukesh is 18 years old: his abundance of testosterone prompted him to continue looking for attacking plays when his advantage was enough to swim and put away his clothes. Ding then showed that, despite everything, he is the world champion, and this time he did find the most precise and sensible defenses at the same time.
And then came what could have been a tragedy. I only had to do the 40th, with less than a minute and two options: one very solid, the one dictated by the intuition of any chess player in such an extreme position; and another that required a complex calculation, for which he lacked time. Only the extreme tension of a world title duel can explain why the champion chose second, which left him in a losing position.
However, that same extreme pressure also took its toll on Gukesh, whose mettle is supposedly one of his greatest virtues. And when he had prophylactic maneuvers to avoid the last blows of his victim, he continued pushing and came face to face with the hidden resources of Ding, to whom no one has given the world title.
Ding explained that he chose the kamikaze variant because the solid one seemed bad to him; In reality, it wasn’t. And he explained his extraordinary resilience: “My position was desperate, but it is not the first time that I have suffered a lot in the opening and middle game of a game and then managed to save it. So I went for it, and I found a saving maneuver.” Gukesh acknowledged that he felt like he was winning, and didn’t give any importance to the fact that he had only two seconds left on the clock on a couple of occasions for the next play. Although it is evident that he shows the tension of a World Cup, he also seems to have the cold blood of a bomb defuser.
