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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 for an overall prize fund of $2.5m (£1.98m) is all square at 6½-6½ after 13 games.
Either Ding or Gukesh can win the world title with a win in today’s 14th game. If it ends in a draw, a series of tiebreak games with faster time controls will be played on Friday to determine the champion.
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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 for an overall prize fund of $2.5m (£1.98m) is all square at 6½-6½ after 13 games.
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Either Ding or Gukesh can win the world title with a win in today’s 14th game. If it ends in a draw, a series of tiebreak games with faster time controls will be played on Friday to determine the champion.
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Key events
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 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 Game 14 of the world chess championship. China’s Ding Liren and India’s Gukesh Dommaraju are facing off in a best-of-14-games match for the winner’s share of a $2.5m (£1.98m) prize fund at the Equarius Hotel at 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 are competing 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 a little more than a half hour from the ceremonial first move. Plenty more to come.
