Slouching tiger, hidden dragon?

Saint Louis 2019. Ding Liren did something that no one had done in a while – defeat Magnus Carlsen in the tie-break playoff of a major tournament. A first since 2007. In a sit-down interview with HT last week, Carlsen used a verb he sparingly does for any fellow chess player. “Ding is someone I massively respected… even feared,” Carlsen said.
The “feared” Ding hasn’t been seen in a while. The 32-year-old Chinese GM will face 18-year-old Gukesh in the World Championship match, starting on Monday. His crown is on the line – the one piece of carry-on Gukesh wants to take back to India from Singapore. As for Ding, almost never has a defending world champion appeared this vulnerable heading into a title match. Who’s to say though which version of him will show up or if he even wants the title enough a second time around?
Gukesh and his team have in the run-up to this match often spoken of preparing for “Ding at his best”. The pre-pandemic Ding – extremely well-rounded, creative, accurate, a player with no real weaknesses so to speak and who may have perhaps troubled Carlsen had he made the 2021 title match – appears to have vanished. In the period between August 2017 and November 2018, he had a remarkable 100-game unbeaten streak in classical chess. Had things been different and life not thrown him a curveball, Ding at his peak may have been a pretty scary guy to go up against in a match.
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“Ding is exactly the kind of a player who you want to see competing in a World Championship match,” Peter Svidler, commentator and coach to R Praggnanandhaa, weighs in. “It’s just so unfortunate the way things turned out for him. I feel spending the COVID years in China where lockdowns were an actual thing, was just incredibly difficult on him,” the Russian GM tells HT, “And when the period was over, he was just a different player.”
For Levon Aronian, who won his second World Cup in 2017 after it came down to a tie-break battle between him and Ding, the Chinese GM has always been something of a mystery. “I’ve never quite understood Ding…it’s probably why I’ve never been able to beat him in classical chess. He beat me thrice.”
“I was under this impression and it’s a thing someone who has known him well shared with me – that at some point he’s going to collapse. …But the guy just never collapsed,” Aronian tells HT.
A mild-mannered introvert with a love for Raymond Carver and Haruki Murakami’s works, Ding comes from the coastal city of Wenzhou, renowned as the cradle of mathematicians in China and as the birthplace of the country’s landscape poetry. “This match reflects the deepness (sic) of my soul,” Ding offered in poetic summation right after he won the world title in 2023 against Ian Nepomniachtchi. A match in which he was never once in the lead through the 14-game classical affair.
During the course of the match, Ding spoke about struggling with his mind and battling depression for the first time publicly. He was already a bit of a broken man when he arrived for that battle. Turning world champion perhaps only made it worse. “After I won the title, my passion for chess dropped a lot,” Ding told HT last June.
He was absent from the circuit for months after becoming world champion, only making his first major classical appearance at Wijk Aan Zee in January 2024. It’s where he defeated Gukesh. The Indian is yet to beat him in classical chess.
Ding spoke to HT in the middle of the Norway Chess tournament where he was suffering, appearing tentative and lacking in confidence. His nervous, involuntary body movements at the board, was being talked about by fellow players. “I’m here as if I’m not here,” he said. A player with the soul of a poet. It’s probably what makes his plight harder to watch.
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He doesn’t mind the ‘underdog’ tag, has called Gukesh the ‘favourite’ and spoken of being worried about losing badly. “Ding is just being honest,” five-time world champion Viswanathan Anand tells HT, “He’s probably reached a stage where he thinks what’s the point of pretending? It probably feels good for him as well. It takes off a lot of pressure.”
Ding is his country’s first male world chess champion. China has six women’s chess champions. Wenzhou, aside from poets and storytellers, is also known for its chess, a game once banned in China. The State’s attitude changed over the years and the 1970s ‘Big Dragon’ project to grow chess in Asia had its impact. In 1995, Wenzhou famously hosted a match between Viktor Korchnoi and China’s first women’s world chess champion, Xie Jun. It may have had a role to play in Ding joining a chess club.
“At this moment, Ding is much harder to understand than Gukesh,” says Aronian. “He appears to be having trouble focusing to his fullest ability so it’s possible that in the earlier tournaments, he didn’t want to stress himself out. Basically save up energy for the match. If that’s the case, he can still be dangerous.”
Svidler too is hoping for a competitive Ding to show up for the match. But he, like most others, isn’t really holding his breath.
“At this point, it looks like it will take nothing short of a miracle for a turnaround. It’s heartbreaking. Ding was such a tremendous player and I was a huge fan… I still am a huge fan.”