2023-05-07 00:50:20
On April 30, at the St. Regis Hotel in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, the Chinese Ding Liren was proclaimed world chess champion. A month earlier, at the Hangzhou training base, home of the Intelligence Building, a ceremony was held to wish him luck before his fight against the Russian Ian Nepomniachtchi, his great favorite. For months, Ding worked tirelessly, but he always saved moments to connect with nature, a humanist and philosophical element very different from the profile of the elite Western chess player. “The team has done a good job supporting me. They know me very well,” Ding said before traveling to Astana. “In addition, both the Tianyuan Building and the new Intellectual Building are by the river. I’ll go for a walk by the river in the evening, this will help me relax.”
David Llada, FIDE Director of Communication and Marketing, has been a direct witness of the duel between Ding Liren and Nepomniachtchi in Kazakhstan. Llada tells me a very beautiful scene: «In Wenzhou [ciudad natal de Ding Liren] It does not snow, although the winters are cold. When a heavy snowfall fell in Astana, towards the middle of the championship, Ding Liren went out a couple of times for a walk with his mother in the park next to the hotel. What amused them most was feeling knee-deep in the snow. And it made me very tender to see them together, almost always holding hands, as if they were two small children. Ding Liren reminds me of a character from the cartoonist Jiro Taniguchi, the walker who seeks inner peace in the small pleasures of life.
silent storm
Ding Liren was born in 1992 in Wenzhou, in the Zhejiang province. A year earlier, the Chinese chess player Xie Jun had become world champion by defeating the Georgian Maia Chiburdanidze in Manila. In 1995, the legendary Viktor Korchnoi visited Wenzhou to face off against Xie Jun. This encounter unleashed an overwhelming passion for the sixty-four squares among the population. Such was the excitement that China declared Wenzhou “The City of Chess.” In this context, Ding Liren’s parents enrolled her son in a local club where he put himself under the command of the renowned teacher Chen Lixing. “I was very lucky,” Ding acknowledged a few years ago. In 2009, at just 17 years old, he was the Chinese champion. A cultured and educated young man, Ding not only put his talent on the board. He studied Law (although he didn’t want to) while reading Raymond Carver, Salinger and Murakami. And, without realizing it, he reached the top. Between 2017 and 2018 he went on a streak of 100 games without losing. His teammates began calling him a pseudonym: Silent Storm.
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A silent and magical storm. Judge if not the facts. After the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, FIDE sanctioned the chess player Serguei Kariakin for his public adherence to Putin’s cause, which prevented Kariakin from participating in the Madrid Candidates Tournament. FIDE chose Ding Liren as a substitute (he was number 3 in the ranking), but the Chinese did not meet a requirement: having played thirty games during 2022, since one of the covid restrictions in China was to prohibit sports competitions. Having received the formal invitation from FIDE, Ding Liren played non-stop, against the clock, and met the demand. He thus completed, on the bell, the list of the eight chess players of the Candidates. In the tournament, Ding went from less to more. He was second, behind Nepomniachtchi. However, after Norwegian Magnus Carlsen relinquished the crown, Ding became a contender for world champion. The carambola is formidable: not being registered in the Candidates for the new king of chess.
Astana, an epic battle
The St. Regis Hotel in Astana was the venue for the duel between Ian Nepomniachtchi and Ding Liren, a vibrant battle in which the Russian was twice ahead of the Chinese. In the first phase of the tournament, Ding did not go through his best moment. He himself recognized it in a press conference, something rare in elite athletes. We soon learned that his girlfriend had left him. “At the beginning of the championship we saw him leave the hotel,” confesses David Llada. «He himself carried his suitcases, he did not even call a bellboy. Apparently, he wanted to change to another hotel because this one had a Chinese restaurant, although he was disappointed afterwards. Another reason was that his room at the St. Regis was, for a humble guy like him, too big. He finally returned to the official hotel and, little by little, he acclimatized, on and off the board. The first fourteen games ended with a result of 7-7. The title was to be decided on the tiebreaker: four rapid games. The tension was maximum.
In the last round of this format, after three straight draws, the fight was fought to an open grave. A fourth draw would have led the players into a series of games with five minutes for each side, with an increment of three seconds for each move made. A fast-paced game. Ding Liren wanted to avoid such a devilish outcome. Nepomniachtchi wore white. The Russian insisted on the Spanish opening, a proposal that was invented in the 16th century by the Zafrense cleric Ruy López. Nepo had already tried the Spanish at different times of the tournament. In the fifth round it worked and he took the victory. This time the chosen line was somewhat complex. His light-squared bishop, the ‘Spanish bishop’, was soon left with no available diagonal to move along, captive on the ‘b1’-square. However, the game reached an even halfgame. Ding Liren maneuvered well in the center of the board, but at the moment of truth his clock marked less than four minutes, against more than ten for the Russian player.
Time trouble could leave Ding Liren on the ropes. The position was double-edged. The analysis modules dictated maximum equality, but the seconds ran very fast against the Chinese. And Nepo hit hard with his queen, threatening ‘hanging’ pieces that had to be defended with the precision of a surgeon. It was then that Ding Liren, with less than two minutes left, transformed into a silent storm and released an accumulated energy never seen before, an electrical charge that fell violently, from his mental cellar, on a board illuminated by pieces and lightning. Thus, dominated by a mysterious lucidity, Ding placed his only rook on the ‘g6’ square, to the bewilderment of the spectators who were following the fight from all corners of the world. The movement «rook ge six» will be studied by future generations and makes this game immortal, one of the most spectacular in the history of this noble sport.
‘Th6!!’
I will try to explain it, as if we unfolded a board between us. It doesn’t matter too much that they don’t know how to play chess, what’s interesting is the concept. With his surprising rook move, Ding prevented the white queen from checking his black king. The formidable thing is that the rook, on that ‘g6’ square, could no longer move (in slang we say that the rook “is pinned”). And it’s not a tasteful dish to purposely dig into a piece when there are other options. In fact, Ding’s black king could have escaped check on the eighth rank, just as it had two moves ago. At the top edge of the board, Nepomniachtchi’s queen was up to her old tricks again. Check! The Chinese player’s king then crouched on the h7-square, but once again White’s queen annoyed the overwhelmed monarch from another square. Check! And it was at this very moment that “rook ge six” happened, just when everyone expected Ding Liren to repeat his royal escape for the eighth rank and, after a triple repetition of moves, the draw was signed. However, Ding blew himself up and transformed his tower into a shield.
Actually, “rook ge six” (Rg6) was part of a much deeper plan. The rook was not just defending, it was targeting the Russian’s white king via the ‘g’ file. Then came a genius from the Chinese, a spectacular pawn move, subtle and essential for Ding’s trick to make sense. The Russian tried to wriggle away, but now he was the one with few seconds left on the clock. And it’s not easy to be precise when you’re playing for the title of world champion with less than a minute left on the clock. With a little more margin Nepomniachtchi would have seen that, on move 59, when everything seemed to fall apart, there was a movement (two, if we played like the machines) with which he would still have avoided defeat. But Nepo, knocked out, ignored it and cracked the already captured rigs on the edge of the gaming table. Suddenly, they fell to the ground. A silent storm had overturned the pieces. Ding had become, against all odds, the new world champion. Magnus Carlsen, on his Twitter account, wrote: “Autoclaved for immortality. Congratulations Ding!”
In a hotel room, Ding’s mother was joyfully hugging the rest of the Chinese delegation. Xie Jun, the first world champion from China, witnessed the feat. Through tears, she said: “We have been waiting for this moment for far too long. The meaning of this championship is no less than the one I won 32 years ago.”
It is exciting. It occurs to me to call Vishy Anand, five-time world champion, and ask him for the key to the championship. «Nepo has had a thousand opportunities to consolidate his position», he answers me to the touch. «Whenever the situation was favorable for him, he made a mistake. I guess game number twelve was the key. The meeting should have ended there. But Ding is to be congratulated. He endured until the end ». I ask the same question to the Ukrainian Ruslan Ponomariov, world champion in 2002. Ruslan speaks clearly: «If Nepo won, in the current political context, he was going to be used as propaganda. I am very happy for Ding Liren, he was not the favorite but, at his age, he has shown to be very mature ». And he adds: «Although the level of the games was not very high, the duel was a show. It is also true that if I look at my own games, I also make mistakes.
It is inevitable for me, to close, to focus on the reverse of this beautiful story, on the terrible disappointment of Nepomniachtchi. I manage to speak with Nikita Vitiugov, an analyst of the Russian, a good guy who answers with effort, with a dead and aching heart: «We were about to win a World Cup many times, at least once or twice, but they beat us. I don’t want to comment on the details of the ‘match’ because I can’t be objective. The reality is that Ding won and, as always happens in sports, the result is fair, although he cannot accept it for now. I don’t know how much time I will need to recover from this, it is surely the hardest moment in my career as a chess player».
I imagine that Ding Liren, as the days go by, will assimilate his feat and return to his walks along the river, like that Taniguchi walker who seeks inner peace in the small pleasures of life.
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