Before the start of the World Championship match in Singapore between Ding Liren and Gukesh, I had a look at the comments on the chessgames.com site about the game they had played at the Tata Steel tournament in Wijk aan Zee in 2023. Ding was then 30 and not yet world champion. Gukesh was 16.
The public at chessgames.com fell over each other in tributes to Ding. “He looks like the next world champion,” wrote one. “Fantastically played by the beast of Wenzhou,” wrote another. A soothsayer called it “probably the best game of 2023” even though it was only January.
A few months later, on April 30, 2023, Ding became world champion by defeating the Russian Jan Nepomniachchi in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan. Already upon his return to China, his behavior was far from that of a triumphant general.
Recently I read a Chinese report (a computer translation of course) about a meeting with the Chinese press in May 2023 where he told how difficult it had been for him to have to answer all sorts of questions as a public figure. The chess crown is too heavy, he said.
“Can you handle it, all this public attention?” someone asked. Ding supported his head in his right hand, a typical chess player’s posture, remained silent for a long time and did not answer. That occurred a few times at that meeting, Ding thinking for a long time and then saying nothing.
He did explain why he had brought Michel Foucault’s book Madness and Civilization with him to Astana for the cup match. It had been quite a surprise when I had learned that he, a Chinese chess player, had chosen a book by a difficult French philosopher as support at the World Championship. He had once said he had listened to the rain in his off hours during a tournament. Wouldn’t that have been more useful than Foucault?
His explanation at that meeting with the Chinese press was equally surprising. He had the Hungarian Richard Rapport as a second, a highly original chess player. Their cooperation was prosperous, and they were clearly good friends at the time.
Rapport, according to Ding, had a chess style that was “eclectic” according to my computer translation. I interpreted it as “anything goes.” That was why he had brought that book.
Should we interpret it to mean that he had packed a philosophical book on madness in his suitcase to better understand his second’s chess style?
Ding also said that when he had become world champion, he had gone to his room and burst into tears. Why that was, he could not say. Afterwards, he had watched a program about video games on a television channel, and he had realized how much he had missed as a small child by always having to play chess. How are you doing now, one of the Chinese journalists asked. Sometimes a little depressed, Ding said.
Leading up to the present match in Singapore there were of course new interviews with Ding and Gukesh. Ding said he was doing better, but not fine yet. Gukesh didn’t want to go into the matter of him being considered the clear favorite. We are both strong players, he said politely.
He had an encouraging message for the young: “My message for children around the world is to just enjoy the game; chess is a beautiful game. You have a lot to gain from it. If you love the game, it’s a very nice hobby. And if you have a lot of talent it’s very nice to be a professional chess player.”
Bravo!
The gods were disdainful
From their Olympus, the chess gods Garry Kasparov and Magnus Carlsen hurled their lightning bolts at the mortals fighting in the valley below. When Ding Liren had won the first game of the match, Carlsen told us on the X platform that Gukesh had done everything wrong that he could possibly do.
The good news for Gukesh, he said, was that he would never be able to play as badly as he had in that first game.
Garry Kasparov had already lashed out and argued that a World Championship match should be a battle between the world’s numbers one and two to determine who is the best chess player on the planet, and that this was not the case now.
When I hear the expression “best on the planet,” I know that Garry is riding his hobby horse.
Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov were indeed the numbers one and two when they played five matches for the world championship between 1984 and 1990. But you can’t always have it like that. When Kasparov played Nigel Short in 1993 to determine who was the best on the planet, Short was eleventh on the rating list, and when Kasparov played his world championship match against Anand in 1995, Anand was sixth.
Although Kasparov did not consider it a real world championship, there was still a lot of interest in the present match. Gukesh is from India and Ding from China. Both countries have about 1.4 billion inhabitants. It is clear that there is a market to be conquered here.
The opening move of the first game was made by the recent Nobel Prize winner Demis Hassabis. For this match, FIDE had entered an alliance with Google, which has resulted in Google creating a nice digital exhibition on chess history, “Beyond the Board” at https://artsandculture.google.com/project/chess/culture
Ding’s win in the first match game, which is shown below, must have been a relief. The last game with classical time schedule that he had won had been against Max Warmerdam in the Tata Steel tournament in Wijk aan Zee in January this year.
Gukesh, 18 years old but with the calmness of an old hand, acted as if nothing had happened and perhaps he was right. He said that his loss was due only to a simple tactical mistake and that nothing had been lost. “It’s only getting more exciting now.”
Someone pointed out that Bobby Fischer had also lost his first game against Boris Spassky in 1972 and still had become world champion, and Gukesh smiled and said that he considered it an honor to be mentioned in the same sentence as Fischer.
I write this after the fifth game, when the score was still even. I think that Ding at his best would still be the best player, but that Gukesh will win, because he is the youngest and the youngest player almost always wins in the World Championship matches.
It has nothing to do with a world championship, but I thought of a game in The Hague in 1949 between the German (then British) grandmaster Jacques Mieses (84) and the Dutch Jonkheer Dirk van Foreest (86), a great-great-uncle of Jorden van Foreest, who won the Tata Steel tournament in 2021.
The 84-year-old Mieses won that game in The Hague in 1949, stood up and exclaimed, “Youth has triumphed!”
Click here to view Gukesh-Ding, World Championship, game 1, Singapore 2024