“I’m afraid [Liren] “Ding is broken forever,” he said in April of chess despite having renounced the world title. And just two days ago he emphasized his pessimism about the current champion: “This duel could be a bloodbath.” But the first game of the fourteen planned in Singapore – with 2.4 million euros in prizes – was quite the opposite: the Indian Dommaraju Gukesh, 18 years old, the youngest candidate in history, who has lost his role as net favorite in just four and a half hours.
“It’s my first win in a long time,” was the first thing Ding said when meeting reporters. And so much: he had not won a game since January 27, against the Dutch Max Warmerdam, in the penultimate round of the Tata tournament in Wijk aan Zee (Netherlands), where he only achieved one other victory, precisely against Gukesh. And after expressing his relief with that phrase, he said another very significant one about his state of mind and the serious problems falling asleep since he became world champion after an exhausting effort: “Today I tried to sleep a little before the game, But I haven’t been able to.”
When this newspaper asked both of them to analyze the game from an emotional level, Ding revealed a very important fact: “I did not get up from my chair throughout the game, to maintain maximum concentration. It’s fair [frente al ruso Ian Niepómniashi]when I got up constantly. I have organized myself so as not to be very hungry or thirsty throughout the afternoon, and that has been key. Furthermore, I recognize that two months ago, at the Chess Olympiad, I was bad, but two months is a long time and now I feel much better.”
and threw balls out: “Today’s outcome is due to a tactical error on my part. There is much mourning ahead. In any case, I had psyched myself up to expect the best version of Ding, and that is what I saw today.”
The game began with an ideal guest of honor: the Briton for having deciphered the structure of 200 million proteins in one of the greatest advances in the history of biology. Chess prodigy child, born to a Singaporean mother, CEO of Deep Mind, a company belonging to Google, which is one of the sponsors of the World Cup, Hassabis owes this scientific feat largely to chess because proteins are composed of amino acids, the number of which Possible combinations is immense, like the number of possible games in chess (a one followed by 123 zeros) and in Go, an even more tactically complex Asian game (a one followed by 700 zeros). The AlphaFold program, created by Hassabis and his team to research proteins, is a spin-off of AlphaZero and AlphaGo, which previously achieved great success in chess and Go.
So the latest revolutionary advances in, for example, liver cancer or antidepressants have a lot to do with the sport where Ding and Gukesh are virtuoso. But there is a major difference: AlphaZero does not have feelings and human chess players do. It is very difficult to deduce exactly what those of Gukesh, the youngest world title contender in history, were at the beginning of the first round of the duel: his hieratic face, an indicator of an astonishing mettle at 18 years old, is very little expressive.
On the contrary, Ding’s trembling countenance and the enormous amount of time he spent making very logical plays were an open book when you also take into account that he has played well below his level since becoming world champion (May 2023) and that he has been medicated to be able to sleep. The Chinese tried to surprise the Indian with the French Defense, which he had only used in a couple of games since 2012; As he later admitted, he did so on the recommendation of his main analyst, the Hungarian Richard Rapport, a great expert in that opening. But Gukesh reacted very quickly, as if he had planned it – and he implied that at the press conference – or perhaps showing a poker face to impress the champion when in reality he was surprised.
Objectively, if you just looked at the board: his position after the first 16 moves was very reasonable. But it had already consumed more than 75 minutes (of the two hours that each one has to reach move 40). The concern was evident on her face and on that of her mother, sitting in the second row of the invited spectators, right in the center, in front of the board, even though her son could not see her because of the glass that separates the stage ( soundproof) of the seats is opaque, to avoid cheating with the help of the public. Gukesh’s father, who is also his representative, did not show up and most likely followed the game on the internet.
At that moment something significant happened: Gukesh spent 33 minutes making a rather simple decision: he was not comfortable. And Ding responded quickly with a brave maneuver because it involved attacking with his king in the center, without castling. Suddenly, Gukesh’s face was no longer iron and showed doubt and fear. The clocks were equalized and, just at that moment, the Chinese launched what seemed like an order: he took the queen very far from his king, apparently to capture a pawn.
Gukesh picked up the gauntlet and attacked on the opposite flank, but then Ding surprised him again: instead of accepting the pawn as a gift, he proposed an exchange of queens, deflating White’s attack. The Indian avoided it, but his remedy was worse than the disease: Ding, increasingly looking like he could take on the world, achieved a very harmonious position while his rival’s White was swimming in chaos. The prospect of the Chinese winning the first round with black, which seemed almost impossible, emerged as a logical outcome.
Whoever visited the spectators’ room at that moment saw a totally unexpected scene: the back of Gukesh’s high chair trembled, reflecting his nervous pedaling. Ding’s mother was gone. Suddenly Viswanathan Anand, five-time world champion and national idol in India, arrived, with a face that showed how his dolphin was on the edge of the precipice.
However, Ding, still insecure after a year and a half of physical and mental ordeal, made an inaccuracy that gave his rival very good counterattack options. But he did not see it, confirming that the surprising reality had completely overwhelmed him: he arrived in Singapore as the undisputed favorite and was on the ropes.
The rest was a breeze for the champion reborn from his ashes, while the candidate, in disbelief, closed his eyes shortly before giving up. Artificial intelligence will probably achieve – when quantum computers exist – for a machine to play chess perfectly, which has been a magnificent field of experimentation for science from Alan Turing (around 1947) to the Nobel Prize winner Hassabis, including Gari’s historic defeat. Kasparov against Deep Blue (IBM) in 1997. But he will never be able to generate fights as exciting and full of emotions as the one experienced this Monday in Singapore.
