Ding Liren completed a most improbable journey to the summit of world chess on Sunday when he defeated Russia’s Ian Nepomniachtchi in a heart-stopping tiebreak playoff to capture the sport’s most prestigious title.
The 30-year-old from Zhejiang province, who never once led in the three-week match at the St Regis Astana Hotel until the moment when victory was in hand, boldly played for a win from what looked to be a drawn position in the last of four rapid games. That fighting spirit paid off handsomely when a stunned Nepomniachtchi resigned after 68 moves, making Ding the first Chinese man to become world chess champion.
“This match reflects the deepness of my soul,” an emotional Ding said afterward. “I could not control my mood. I will cry. I will burst into tears. It was quite a tough tournament for me. I feel quite relieved.”
The €2m ($2.2m) world title contest in the Kazakh capital was largely played in the shadow of Magnus Carlsen, the longtime champion and world No 1 who opted against defending his crown last year, citing a lack of motivation to endure the months-long slog of preparation that championship matches demand.
Carlsen had strengthened his claim as the greatest player of any era back in 2021, when he crushed Nepomniachtchi in Dubai in the fourth defense of the title he’d first won from Viswanathan Anand in 2013. His winning score of 7½-3½ with three games to spare was the most lopsided result in a world title match since José Raúl Capablanca’s triumph over Emanuel Lasker exactly 100 years before in Havana.
But the Norwegian floated the idea of surrendering his title almost immediately afterward and finally confirmed his abdication last summer. It marked only the second time in the 137-year history of world championship matchplay that a reigning champion has elected to not defend his title – after American grandmaster Bobby Fischer controversially forfeited the crown amid clashes with organizers over the match format in 1975.
The most direct beneficiary of Carlsen’s decision was Ding, who finished second behind Nepomniachtchi in last year’s eight-man candidates tournament to determine the world title challenger. That set the stage for a delicious matchup between the second-ranked Nepomniachtchi and third-ranked Ding, even if critics including longtime world champion Garry Kasparov criticized it as an “amputated” event in Carlsen’s absence.
The bloody, back-and-forth showdown that unfolded in Astana extended into a rapid tiebreak playoff after the scheduled best-of-14-games classical portion ended in a 7-all deadlock, with each player winning three games and drawing the remaining eight.
The first three of Sunday’s four games, where each player had 25 minutes in total plus an added 10 seconds after each move, ended in draws. The fourth appeared headed in the same direction, a result that would have sent the contest to a second round of tiebreakers under the even shorter blitz format.
But Ding, playing with the black pieces, surprised onlookers by refusing a draw by repititon despite running dangerously low on time, instead self-pinning his king (46. ... Rg6) in a courageous move to play for the full point. From there Nepomniachtchi, suddenly under time pressure of his own, made a series of critical blunders that spelled his doom.
“I guess I had every chance,” said the 32-year-old from Bryansk, who played under a neutral Fide flag after signing an open letter last year condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “I had so many promising positions and probably should have tried to finish everything in the classical portion. ... Once it went to a tiebreak, of course it’s always some sort of lottery, especially after 14 games [of classical chess]. Probably my opponent made less mistakes, so that’s it.”
Ding, who earned the €1.1m ($1.2m) winner’s share of the prize fund, joins the Shanghai-born Ju Wenjun to give China both the men’s and women’s world champions, an unthinkable outcome during the Cultural Revolution when chess was banned as an activity of the decadent West.
