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China’s Ding Liren is defending the world chess championship against fast-rising Indian teenager Gukesh Dommaraju. The best-of-14-games match is scheduled to take place from 23 November to 15 December at Resorts World Sentosa for an overall prize fund of $2.5m (£1.98m).
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China’s Ding Liren is defending the world chess championship against fast-rising Indian teenager Gukesh Dommaraju. The best-of-14-games match is scheduled to take place from 23 November to 15 December at Resorts World Sentosa for an overall prize fund of $2.5m (£1.98m).
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Key events
Ding finally plays 6…Nc6 and Gukesh immediately responds with 7 c3. Another long think for the champion.
The French is a bit of a surprise from Ding. They go through their next moves quickly (2 d4 d5 3 Nc3 Nf6 4 e5 Nfd7 5 f4 c5 6 Nce2), before Ding is the first person to stop and take a think.
Game 1 is under way!
Gukesh opens with a king’s pawn (1 e4) and Ding responds with a French Defense (1…e6).
Ding and Gukesh have entered the playing hall. They have taken their seats as the American grandmaster Maurice Ashley goes through the introductions.
Our Leonard Barden has filed his final dispatch ahead of today’s opening game. Barden, who’s written the Guardian’s chess column every week since September 1955, doesn’t divert from the general consensus in his assessment of the match.
The preliminaries are nearly over: who will win? I expect Gukesh to be cautious in the first few games, then to probe and push hard in the middle of the match. Ding’s 2024 form has been so wretched that it is difficult to see how he can keep his title. A 7.5-4.5 margin for Gukesh looks about right.
The format
Here’s a review of the format for the world championship match. Ding and Gukesh will play up to 14 classical games with each player awarded one point for a win and a half-point for a draw. Whoever reaches seven and a half points first will be declared the champion (and no further games will be played).
The time control for each game is 120 minutes per side for the first 40 moves, then 30 minutes for the rest of the game, with a 30-second increment per move starting with move 41. Players are not allowed to agree to a draw before black’s 40th move. A draw claim before then is only permitted if a threefold repetition or stalemate has occurred.
If the score is equal after 14 games, a series of tiebreak games with faster time controls will be played.
The complete official regulations can be found here.
A look inside the playing hall with 20 minutes to go. And Gukesh’s imperial seating arrangement. Not much longer now.
Lots of history on hand in Singapore. Not only is this year’s world championship match the first in 138 years to feature two Asian men, it’s also the first without at least one European player. Gukesh addressed that milestone, and what it means for the sport, in a virtual press conference on Tuesday.
“It’s nice that this will be the first time there is no European in a world championship match,” Gukesh said. “And I hope in Asia it becomes even more popular, but I think we’re already seeing some very nice growth, not only in India. China has also been a superpower for a few years, and Uzbekistan is also catching up. There’s a lot of potential. Chess is most popular in India by a far margin. I hope it grows even bigger in India but also that other countries take it more seriously.”
Additionally, Gukesh has been working with renowned mind coach Paddy Upton, the South African guru who was part of the backroom staff for the Indian cricket team when they won the 2011 World Cup and the Indian hockey team as they claimed bronze at the Paris Olympics. “Everything can be right in the lead-up to the big moments of performance, but if the arrow is not sharp, it won’t penetrate the bullseye,” Upton told the Indian Express. “Similarly, you might have a golfer whose game is perfect, but things go wrong if they’ve got a limp wrist at the moment of impact. I think there is now more recognition in the world of sport of how mental gains can reduce these moments.”
How do they match up?
Ding and Gukesh have met only three times in classical games due to their age difference. Ding holds a 2½-½ edge in their head-to-head with two wins and one draw, all since January 2023. Their most recent meeting happened in January at the Tata Steel Chess Tournament in Wijk aan Zee, where Ding won playing as black.
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But Ding has played only 44 classical games in the 19 months since winning the world title amid a well-documented bout with depression. Since returning from a nine-month hiatus to prioritize his mental health, Ding suffered four consecutive losses and came in dead last at the Norway Chess tournament in May, finished third from bottom at August’s Sinquefield Cup at St Louis after winning just 3½ points from nine games, then failed to win a single game at September’s Chess Olympiad in Budapest to drop out of the top 20. He enters the world title match on a 28-game winless streak in classical games dating back to January.
Most of the world’s top players have expressed great pessimism about Ding’s chances due to his sparse activity and unremarkable form. So too have the oddsmakers, who have installed him as a roughly 3-1 underdog. Carlsen says: “Obviously, Gukesh is a significant favorite, and if he strikes first he will win the match without any trouble. However, the longer it goes without a decisive game, the better it is for Ding Liren, because he has the ability but he doesn’t have the confidence.”
We’ve gone through the 138-year history of the world championship and chosen 22 of the most memorable games. You can go move by move through each of them here. It’s the perfect timesuck with roughly 45 minutes to go before today’s first move.
From the middle of the 16th century, there have come down to us the names of chess players who have been widely regarded as the strongest of their time. The earliest of these was the Spanish priest Ruy López de Segura, after whom one of the most popular openings of modern times is named. Others who followed include the Calabrese Gioachino Greco, François-André Danican Philidor, Louis-Charles Mahé de La Bourdonnais, Alexander McDonnell, Howard Staunton, Adolf Anderssen, Mikhail Chigorin and Paul Morphy, each of whom are lionized for their contributions to the development of theory and strategy as well as their dominance over their board during their respective eras.
But not until Wilhelm Steinitz and Johannes Zukertort sat down in a small room at 80 Fifth Avenue in New York City on the afternoon of 11 January 1886 did a formal competition to determine the best player on the planet come to pass. Their first-to-10-wins encounter was held in three US cities over the next 78 days for a prize fund of $4,000. Since then, the world chess championship has provided the stage for countless unforgettable contests showcasing the precision, imagination and brilliance of the royal game at the highest level.
The credibility of Ding’s world title, of course, remains an open question. The absence of Magnus Carlsen continues to loom large over the sport’s showcase event. The 33-year-old Norwegian has been ranked No 1 for more than 14 straight years and was considered the world’s best player even before he defeated Viswanathan Anand for the world championship in 2013. He strengthened his claim as the greatest player of any era in 2021, when he crushed Nepomniachtchi in Dubai in the fourth defense of the title.
But Carlsen decided against defending it for a fifth time in 2023, citing a lack of motivation to go through the months-long slog of preparation that championship matches demand. It marked only the second time in the history of world title matchplay that a holder opted not to defend his crown after Bobby Fischer controversially forfeited the belt in 1975.
Instead, Ding defeated Nepomniatchi in a thrilling match for the vacant title, even if critics including longtime world champion Garry Kasparov branded it an “amputated” event without the world’s best player involved.
Kasparov has only doubled down on that sentiment ahead of this year’s title match, saying:
My hottest take is that I don’t treat it as a world championship match. For me a world championship match was always the match for the title of the best player in the world. I think the history of the world championship matches, it started, by the way, here in St Louis, with Steinitz facing Zukertort back in 1886, has ended with Magnus Carlsen. There were 16 world champions, you could call them at every given moment the best players. It’s those who took the title by beating the best player. With all due respect, Ding playing Gukesh, it’s an important event, it’s still a Fide event, it’s an ‘official title’, but these days with all the modern technologies, with chess getting faster and faster, with our lives getting also faster, to keep an antiquated system of qualification, 18 months or longer, to select the challenger, it’s not adequate. … It’s an event that has nothing to do with the main idea of the world championship – to decide, to define the best player on the planet.
Well then!
Preamble
Hello and welcome to Singapore for day one of the world chess championship. Over the next few weeks, China’s Ding Liren and the fast-rising Indian teenager Gukesh Dommaraju will compete in a scheduled best-of-14-games match for the winner’s share of a $2.5m (£1.98m) prize fund at the Resorts World Sentosa, an island resort off Singapore’s southern coast. It’s the first time in the 138-year history of world championship matchplay that two men from Asia will compete for the sport’s most prestigious title.
Ding became China’s first men’s world chess champion by defeating Ian Nepomniachtchi last year on tiebreakers in Kazakhstan. Known for his solid and precise playing style based on creating small positional advantages from quiet openings, the 32-year-old from Zhejiang province is the highest-rated Chinese player of all time. A graduate of Peking University Law School, he once went unbeaten in 100 straight classical games, a record streak broken only by Magnus Carlsen in 2019.
Gukesh Dommaraju, commonly known as Gukesh D, is an 18-year-old Indian prodigy who became the third-youngest grandmaster in history at 12 years and seven months. In April, at 17, the Chennai native stunned the chess establishment by winning the eight-man Candidates tournament in Toronto to become the youngest ever challenger for the world championship, finishing top of a stacked field that included Nepomniachtchi, Hikaru Nakamura and Fabiano Caruana. An aggressive player known for using sharp, tactical openings to create complex positions aimed at unsettling opponents, he can shatter the record for youngest ever undisputed world champion held by Garry Kasparov, who was 22 when he dethroned Karpov in their 1985 rematch in Moscow.
We’re an hour away from the ceremonial first move. Plenty more to come.
