Chess: Ding misses wins and his prep leaks as Nepomniachtchi keeps the lead
Russia’s Ian Nepomniachtchi, 32, has a fortunate 5-4 lead over China’s Ding Liren, 30, as their €2mn world championship match in Astana, Kazakhstan, moves into the second half of its scheduled 14 games. Ding stood better in game seven before he collapsed under time pressure, with eight moves to make in 45 seconds, and had a dominating advantage in game eight, where Nepomniachtchi escaped defeat by a mixture of bluff and brilliant defence, aided by his opponent’s miscalculations. Game 10 starts on Sunday at 10am BST and the official website is worldchampionship.fide.com.
Friday’s drawn game nine was calmer, as Nepomniachtchi maintained his lead while Ding looked ahead to his next White in game 10. In line with their mutual strategies, Ding countered the Russian’s Ruy Lopez 1 e4 e5 2 Nf3 Nc6 3 Bb5 with the Berlin 3…Nf6, which for 20 years since Vladimir Kramnik successfully used it against Garry Kasparov, has been a sign that Black sets his stall out for a draw.
Nepomniachtchi avoided the heavily analysed Berlin Wall with an early queen exchange, and opted for 4 d3 and a traditional Ruy formation where White’s knights and bishops take aim at the black king from a distance. Nepomniachtchi had a small edge, but Ding countered with active piece play and, following the exchange of queens at move 32, the game simplified to a rook and knight ending with an extra pawn for White.
Nepomniachtchi pressed for a long time, right down to knight and pawn against knight, but Ding’s defence was accurate. Game nine was finally drawn after 82 moves and six hours, the longest game of the match.
Ding’s three best opportunities in game eightwere 26 Rd3! transferring the rook to the h file, 32 Qxd8! when White’s king can escape perpetual check, and 37 Bc6! followed by Qxb6 and advancing the a pawn.
It also emerged that some of Ding’s prep with his aide Richard Rapport was allowed to reach the lichess online database, as the opening of a game between two anonymous players in February exactly anticipated Thursday’s Nimzo-Indian 1 d4 Nf6 2 c4 e6 3 Nc3 Bb4 along with Ding’s novelty 9 Ra2! Another of the anonymous games included the 1 d4 Nf6 2 c4 e6 3 Nf3 d5 4 h3?! of game two, which shocked the chess world.
Earlier, Nepomniachtchi went ahead when Ding, with the better position in game seven, suffered what has been described as a freeze, meltdown, or collapse at moves 31-32.
The opening was a French Defence 1 e4 e6, appearing in a world title match for the first time since 1978. It proved a good choice, as Ding repelled White’s dangerous early attack and took the initiative until calculating the complications ate into his time.
Black could have kept his edge by 31…Bd8! regrouping the bishop to c7. After that, Ding still had six minutes on his clock for eight moves to reach
the move 40 time control, but let it run down to 45 seconds and then panicked, failing to make the centralising 32…Be5! He missed the safe 33…Rd5, instead blundering his c5 pawn, and finally resigned when Nepomniachtchi was poised for a decisive rook invasion.
How to explain it? Ominously, this was Ding’s second psychological failure of the series, following game two where he took half an hour early on for a poor choice, then followed up with further errors until he resigned a hopeless position with seconds left on his clock. The time limit for the first 40 moves is two hours, crucially without the per move increment which is normal in online play and also frequent over the board. It sounds almost as if the 30-year-old from Wenzhou simply forgot about the absence of increment while in a trance-like state at move 32, but one would expect any world championship contestant’s preparation to include training games designed for the time control.
Freezing at a critical moment or during a crucial game is a concept which will be familiar to many tournament competitors, and the consequences can be serious. In the A final of the 1954 Amsterdam Olympiad, England were paired with Sweden, and the board four pairing was Leonard Barden v Bengt-Eric Hörberg. The Swedish player blundered by 25…Rh3? allowing the tactic 26 Nxf5! followed by White winning rook for knight. White, however, had used too much time earlier and was down to 10 moves in three minutes.
A crowd gathered round the board, I became transfixed by the apparent double threat of Nxa3 and Kb7, my clock flag fell, and I still remember the look of horror on the faces of the watching senior England players Hugh Alexander and Harry Golombek. The final position is an easy win for White by 35 Bd6+ Kb7 36 Rc7+, with c3 or f5 to follow. I was benched for the remaining rounds in Amsterdam, and dropped from the Olympiad team for the next six years…
Several of the games at Astana have been one-sided, but not for the same player. Anish Giri, the world No 6 and match commentator, attributes this to “asymmetrical equality”where one competitor’s strength is his opponent’s weakness. Nepomnoachtchi and Ding have had five decisive results in their first seven games, for which the last precedent was the third Mikhail Botvinnik v Vasily Smyslov match of 1958. In contrast, the first seven games of Carlsen’s last three championship matches had a total of just one decisive result, the 136-move marathon of game six in 2021.
England’s gold standard for its youngest talents is Luke McShane’s 1993 world under-10 championship at age nine, outpacing a field which included several future elite grandmasters. Also in the frame are David Howell’s blitz victory at eight years nine months over John Nunn at the 1999 Mind Sports Olympiad, the youngest ever win against a GM in an official event, and Howell’s subsequent qualifying for the 2000 British Championship and scoring a 2200-plus rated performance there at nine.
All that was 20-30 years ago. Nobody has approached the McShane and Howell landmarks since, until last weekend, when Kushal Jakhria and Bodhana Sivanandan, both aged eight, made quantum leaps.
Jakhria was the youngest entrant at the powerful Menorca Open, won by India’s 16-year-old star Dommaraju Gukesh, and was seeded a lowly 196 out of 200, but he scored 4.5/9, earning a 2213 master level tournament rating plus a best performance prize.
Sivanandan, who shared the England women’s blitz championship last December at seven, scored 6/11 to tie for second woman in the British Rapidplay at Bradford, where the overall champion was IM Ameet Ghasi on 10/11. Her rating performance was 2130, the level of a Women’s Fide Master, and this strategic endgame was impressive.
These are not yet results at the level which McShane and Howell achieved at eight and nine, but both children only had their eighth birthdays in March. They are likely to be ranked the world Nos 1 and 2 under-nines when Fide publishes its May rating list next weekend.
There is currently no official backing for chess, despite a vigorous campaign by the charity Chess in Schools and Communities, but Jakhria and Sivanandan receive help from the ECF’s Accelerator Programme for elite talents. Both are being supported by the John Robinson Youth Chess Trust, while Sivanandan’s coaching is sponsored by the biotech company e-therapeutics, whose chief executive is IM Ali Mortazavi.
3864:1 Bg2! g4 2 Rh1! gxf3 3 Bg1! fxg2 4 f3! gxh1=Q 5 Rd5 mate.