2023 FIDE World Championship Match Nepo-Ding

All Things Chess
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This thread is for my comments on the match and for anyone else who wants to add theirs.

Did you see Game 2? A monster performance by Nepo. No wonder Carlson wanted no part of it and decided he really wasn’t interested after Nepo won the Candidates again.

Ding made no obvious mistake, played pretty well really as far as I can tell. And he got miniatured in 29 moves. Nepo’s comment in the press conference is that after about move 15, the game played itself. ONLY IF YOU’RE NEPO. Even Vishy Anand got crucial decisions wrong.

By the way the commentary team of Vishy and Irina Krush is excellent. Both are very pleasant and constructive, Irina makes good solid suggestions, and of course Vishy is Vishy.

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2.h3 is vewy interesting but shtoopid! :smiling_imp:

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If you think Carlsen is the least bit scared of Nepo, think again. He crushed Ian in their match. GM Daniil Dubov has a better perspective on Magnus in this interview:

en.chessbase.com/post/dubov-int … nship-2023

Ding’s play in game 2 was clearly substandard for a world championship player. 4.h3?!, apparently an invention of his second, Richard Rapport, is not likely to take the chess world by storm. Ding spent a whole half hour on his 12th move considering whether to capture on f6 or c5, ended up choosing the inferior Nxf6, and then in the post-game interview confessed that in all that time he had never looked at Nepo’s recapture with the pawn. Ding gets a rest day to regroup, but will clearly have to start playing better if he wants to stay in the match.

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You should think again! Dubov is Carlsen’s old team member, the Russian who worked against Nepo in the last match.

Check the games of the 21 match again. Carlsen had a near-death experience in the first 4 or so games, could have been 2 points behind. Then Nepo cracked. But with more experience in a repeat, he probably would not crack again. Nepo getting stronger, Carlsen plateaued at best, etc.

Carlsen said after the last match that he would only defend in 23 if his challenger was Firouzja. Very hot at the time but Carlsen could probably tell that he could own him in a match. Carlsen knows everything about positional play. Firouzja never will. Now we see Firouzja isn’t even in the top 10.

Nepo’s style is like dynamite. Carlsen clearly does not know how to control it with his expert positional play.

And I gave up any expectation of honor and honest communication from Carlsen, we saw his real character, in what he tried to do to Hans Niemann for the unforgivable sin of beating him in the Sinquefield. So I am perfectly comfortable assigning base motives to all his actions here.

But Carlsen didn’t formally commit to giving up the title until he saw the result of the 22 Candidates, even though the leaders should have known what was at stake in the final rounds – were there two qualification spots or only one? Should Hikaru have played safer? Firouzja was not a potential winner, but Carlsen didn’t seem to require Firouzja anymore. It was probably more like anyone-but-Nepo.

But when Nepo won, Carlsen was out.

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You’re entitled to your opinion that Carlsen is scared to play Nepo. I don’t think many in the chess world would agree with you.

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Game 3 a fairly balanced draw. Nepo surprised with 1. d4.

Ding, playing black, seems to have recovered normal form, even good form. Now he sits at the board rather than putting on a winter coat and slumping in his lounge room. He said in the press conference that he had had a mental problem and thought he might want to see a doctor, but a friend talked him down and put him in a better mood.

Someone said in the comments that Lichess gave Ding 100% for accuracy in the game, didn’t say what Nepo’s accuracy score was. Since most of it was a repeat of Giri-Ding from last year, that’s possible. Ding played very slowly repeating that game, then played faster once the games diverged. Nepo deviated from that game, leaving his queen on d2 rather than moving it to f2, before bringing his knight back from c1 to e2.

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After Nepo’s 28.Nd4 in game three the engine gives Ding a slight edge. He could have played for complications with 28…b5!?, but after his debacle in round two he opted to essentially force the draw with 28…Ne6. An easy draw with the Black pieces is not a bad result under the circumstances.

Today in game four Ding came back to level the score with a nice win. He has played nearly flawless chess since the rest day after game two.

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Yes, a very strong performance today from Ding in Game 4. Nepo played very well too except for one mistake, Nd4 allowing the exchange sac. Nepo played it quickly, in a minute or so, not sensing the danger. Nepo didn’t see that Rxd4 cxd4 Nb3 (as in the game) c5 would allow d6, and in the press conference Ding even says that he didn’t see it in advance either, just after Nepo had played Nd4. He almost couldn’t believe it, that he had this way to win. So neither player saw it until that move.

Apparently when Nepo played Nf4 early in the game, Giri said that he had confused his prep. Nepo confirmed the same thing in the press conference that he had not intended to get the middle game he got and regretted it. Should probably play Qf6 before Nf4. But the middle game was OK for him, just difficult to play. And he was doing well enough until much later he quickly played Nd4.

Nf4 early in the game was also played quickly. This is Nepo’s weakness, playing some critical moves quickly. Far less often does he work hard on a move and end up making a mistake.

So another seemingly flawless game by Ding, and maybe two mistakes by Nepo, Nf4 which was wrongly remembering his prep, and Nd4 losing the game, both played quickly.

I just saw that Anand also noticed that both mistakes were played quickly, and he said they were evidence of Nepo’s nervous tension. twitter.com/hashtag/NepoDing?src=hashtag_click

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meanwhile, what’s Magnus been up to…?

msn.com/en-us/sports/other/ … 5948&ei=12

…scot…

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I was wondering how Nepo would react to his loss in round 4. Would he fold up like he did when he first lost a game against Carlsen? The answer is no. Nepo outplayed Ding from a balanced position and scored a nice win. Now, how will Ding take this second loss?

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Game 5 was a positional masterpiece by Nepo. So many things were just obvious to him that ended up being correct decisions. I wouldn’t have had the guts to play g5, busting up my pawns, without a concrete path to a win. (Not to compare my playing strength to his, other than to say it’s much lower.) He just knew it was positionally strong, and of course he calculates like a monster too.

I watched the FIDE commentary again, now Dubov has replaced Anand, and Krush is still there. Dubov did not mention g5 as a possibility either.

Ding could have played better, but it would have been torture in any case.

Dubov is entertaining to listen to, and Krush keeps things civil. Dubov has a personal rivalry with Nepo and mentioned they were opponents from junior chess days, and it sort of boiled over at the beginning when he spewed a few amazing insults at Nepo, saying he was just sitting around picking up any pieces the opponent left hanging etc., but then he settled down and had to admit this game was a masterpiece.

There is another commentary on youtube from chess.com, with Giri and Naroditsky. I watched that for a few minutes and found it boring, which is surprising because I usually enjoy Giri. But here he didn’t even want to talk about the opening, a strange comment from someone who is presumably being paid to do just that. And Naroditsky was deferring to him or wasn’t sure about what to do at that moment, so neither one was saying anything. Maybe that commentary was better at other times.

I think Ding can bounce back, especially because he was able to say in public at the press conference that this loss hurt badly, and because he’s already won a good game in the match. Confessing is a big step to putting it behind. But he has to find a way to avoid slight disadvantages! Ding has done well in this match (1.5 out of 2, games 2 and 4) when he’s played perfectly.

But Dubov said that from at least the Candidates onward, whenever Nepo gets a positional advantage, even if it’s slight, he wins consistently. 2 out of 2 in this match (games 1 and 5), and Ding wasn’t making obvious mistakes in either game.

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Losing to Botez.

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I don’t think we’ve seen so many decisive games in a World Championship match since the start of Fischer-Spassky.

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In the PCA World Championship match in 1993 Kasparov won three of the first four, and five of the first nine against Nigel Short.

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In Game 6, Ding won with the London System. After the game, Ian thought he had played badly and was clearly angry with himself because what he tried did not work, but actually he had played pretty well.

The problem is that Ding played “absolutely perfectly” in a complex middlegame. “Disturbingly beautiful”. A new standard of play, higher than what we’ve seen before, according to Dubov. Dubov included Carlsen as not meeting that standard. Someone in the press conference said that Giri called Ding a “total genius”.

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Really need increment from move one.

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After again coming back with a nice win in game six to level the score in the match Ding blundered away game seven. Instead of 33…Rd3?? the simple 33…Rd5 would have maintained equality. So much for Ding being a “total genius”.

Before the match GM Daniil Dubov opined that the result depended mostly on Ding, that his A game was better than Nepo’s A game, but that Nepo’s B game was much better than Ding’s B game. He estimated the match odds at 60-40 in Nepo’s favor. Once again Ding is going to have to find his A game to even the score, and if he wants to win the match it needs to stay around longer than for just one game.

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A draw, and a close miss for Ding today. On at least two occasions he missed a winning continuation. For the second straight game Ding got into serious time pressure and it has cost him both times.

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