What time is Sport 1 of the Ding Liren v Gukesh Dommaraju World Chess Championship?
China’s Ding Liren is defending the world chess championship in opposition to fast-rising Indian teenager Gukesh Dommaraju. The perfect-of-14-games match is scheduled to happen from 23 November to fifteen December at Resorts World Sentosa for an general prize fund of $2.5m (£1.98m).
Enable content material supplied by a 3rd celebration?
This text contains content material hosted on lichess.org. We ask to your permission earlier than something is loaded, because the supplier could also be utilizing cookies and different applied sciences. To view this content material, click on ‘Enable and proceed’.
Key occasions
Gukesh has been on the clock for greater than 10 minutes, pondering his response to 10…Qa5.
Reader John Cox sends in a pleasant correction for IM Lawrence Trent:
Lawrence can’t be proper that 6 Nce2 isn’t within the notes – this isn’t some sideline or novelty; it’s White’s second hottest transfer and most bold attempt in the most well-liked GM line in opposition to Ding’s chosen opening. It’s arduous to overstate how astonishing it’s that Ding’s apparently on his personal already.
Ding lastly decides on 10…Qa5. And now Gukesh settles in for his first consider the sport.
The stat of the day comes from the mailbag. Longtime reader Sean emails to say that in 138 years of world championship matches, the French Protection (1 e4 e6) has solely been performed thrice within the opening sport. And all three of these video games ended decisively.
Some barely worrying physique language from Ding, who’s greater than 45 minutes behind on time earlier than making his tenth transfer.
The English IM Lawrence Trent doesn’t like what he sees for Ding. “Hate to say it however don’t see how Ding survives immediately,” he writes. This simply isn’t his form of place in any respect and he’s already half-hour behind on the clock. I’d additionally wager that 6.Nce2 isn’t in his notes wherever.”
We’ve a transfer! Ding goes with 7…a5. And Gukesh instantly develops a knight in response. The following few strikes: 8 Nf3 a4 9 Be3 Be7. The teenage challenger then blitzes out the novelty 10 g4. Fearless. And Ding is already a half-hour behind on the clock.
A 24-minute suppose (and counting) for Ding Liren on the seventh transfer of this world championship match.
“At this level I’m form of slightly bit fearful about Ding that he’s spending an excessive amount of time on deciding and he’s hesitating an excessive amount of at this level,” Polgar says on Chess24’s broadcast. “Or does he have slightly concern about what is going to occur in Sport 1 or how he ought to be dealing with this very particular second.”
Ding has been considering for 17 minutes and counting. “It can’t be a strong sport anymore,” the Hungarian grandmaster Judit Polgár says. “The knives are out. They’re combating.”
An enormous resolution that can dictate the following few strikes looms.
Ding lastly performs 6…Nc6 and Gukesh instantly responds with 7 c3. One other lengthy suppose for the champion.
The French is a little bit of a shock from Ding. They undergo their subsequent strikes rapidly (2 d4 d5 3 Nc3 Nf6 4 e5 Nfd7 5 f4 c5 6 Nce2), earlier than Ding is the primary individual to cease and take a suppose.
Sport 1 is below approach!
Gukesh opens with a king’s pawn (1 e4) and Ding responds with a French Protection (1…e6).
Ding and Gukesh have entered the taking part in corridor. They’ve taken their seats because the American grandmaster Maurice Ashley goes by the introductions.
Our Leonard Barden has filed his final dispatch forward of immediately’s opening sport. Barden, who’s written the Guardian’s chess column each week since September 1955, doesn’t divert from the overall consensus in his evaluation of the match.
The preliminaries are almost over: who will win? I anticipate Gukesh to be cautious within the first few video games, then to probe and push arduous in the course of the match. Ding’s 2024 type has been so wretched that it’s troublesome to see how he can hold his title. A 7.5-4.5 margin for Gukesh appears about proper.
The format
Right here’s a evaluate of the format for the world championship match. Ding and Gukesh will play as much as 14 classical video games with every participant awarded one level for a win and a half-point for a draw. Whoever reaches seven and a half factors first will likely be declared the champion (and no additional video games will likely be performed).
The time management for every sport is 120 minutes per aspect for the primary 40 strikes, then half-hour for the remainder of the sport, with a 30-second increment per transfer beginning with transfer 41. Gamers will not be allowed to comply with a draw earlier than black’s fortieth transfer. A draw declare earlier than then is just permitted if a threefold repetition or stalemate has occurred.
If the rating is equal after 14 video games, a sequence of tiebreak video games with quicker time controls will likely be performed.
The entire official laws might be discovered here.
A glance contained in the taking part in corridor with 20 minutes to go. And Gukesh’s imperial seating association. Not for much longer now.
Numerous historical past available in Singapore. Not solely is that this yr’s world championship match the primary in 138 years to characteristic two Asian males, it’s additionally the primary with out at the least one European participant. Gukesh addressed that milestone, and what it means for the game, in a digital press convention on Tuesday.
“It’s good that this would be the first time there isn’t any European in a world championship match,” Gukesh stated. “And I hope in Asia it turns into much more standard, however I believe we’re already seeing some very good progress, not solely in India. China has additionally been a superpower for a number of years, and Uzbekistan can also be catching up. There’s numerous potential. Chess is hottest in India by a far margin. I hope it grows even larger in India but in addition that different international locations take it extra significantly.”
Moreover, Gukesh has been working with famend thoughts coach Paddy Upton, the South African guru who was a part of the backroom employees for the Indian cricket crew once they gained the 2011 World Cup and the Indian hockey crew as they claimed bronze on the Paris Olympics. “Every thing might be proper within the lead-up to the massive moments of efficiency, but when the arrow isn’t sharp, it gained’t penetrate the bullseye,” Upton told the Indian Express. “Equally, you may need a golfer whose sport is ideal, however issues go mistaken in the event that they’ve acquired a limp wrist in the intervening time of affect. I believe there may be now extra recognition on the earth of sport of how psychological positive factors can cut back these moments.”
How do they match up?
Ding and Gukesh have met solely thrice in classical video games attributable to their age distinction. Ding holds a 2½-½ edge of their head-to-head with two wins and one draw, all since January 2023. Their most up-to-date assembly occurred in January on the Tata Metal Chess Match in Wijk aan Zee, the place Ding gained taking part in as black.
Enable content material supplied by a 3rd celebration?
This text contains content material hosted on lichess.org. We ask to your permission earlier than something is loaded, because the supplier could also be utilizing cookies and different applied sciences. To view this content material, click on ‘Enable and proceed’.
However Ding has performed solely 44 classical video games within the 19 months since profitable the world title amid a well-documented bout with despair. Since coming back from a nine-month hiatus to prioritize his psychological well being, Ding suffered 4 consecutive losses and got here in useless final on the Norway Chess match in Might, completed third from backside at August’s Sinquefield Cup at St Louis after profitable simply 3½ factors from 9 video games, then didn’t win a single sport at September’s Chess Olympiad in Budapest to drop out of the highest 20. He enters the world title match on a 28-game winless streak in classical video games relationship again to January.
A lot of the world’s high gamers have expressed nice pessimism about Ding’s possibilities attributable to his sparse exercise and unremarkable type. So too have the oddsmakers, who’ve put in him as a roughly 3-1 underdog. Carlsen says: “Clearly, Gukesh is a major favourite, and if he strikes first he’ll win the match with none bother. Nonetheless, the longer it goes with no decisive sport, the higher it’s for Ding Liren, as a result of he has the flexibility however he doesn’t have the arrogance.”
We’ve gone by the 138-year historical past of the world championship and chosen 22 of probably the most memorable video games. You’ll be able to go transfer by transfer by every of them here. It’s the right timesuck with roughly 45 minutes to go earlier than immediately’s first transfer.
From the center of the sixteenth century, there have come right down to us the names of chess gamers who’ve been broadly thought to be the strongest of their time. The earliest of those was the Spanish priest Ruy López de Segura, after whom one of the most popular openings of contemporary occasions is known as. Others who adopted embrace the Calabrese Gioachino Greco, François-André Danican Philidor, Louis-Charles Mahé de La Bourdonnais, Alexander McDonnell, Howard Staunton, Adolf Anderssen, Mikhail Chigorin and Paul Morphy, every of whom are lionized for his or her contributions to the event of concept and technique in addition to their dominance over their board throughout their respective eras.
However not till Wilhelm Steinitz and Johannes Zukertort sat down in a small room at 80 Fifth Avenue in New York Metropolis on the afternoon of 11 January 1886 did a proper competitors to find out the perfect participant on the planet come to move. Their first-to-10-wins encounter was held in three US cities over the following 78 days for a prize fund of $4,000. Since then, the world chess championship has supplied the stage for numerous unforgettable contests showcasing the precision, creativeness and brilliance of the royal sport on the highest stage.
The credibility of Ding’s world title, after all, stays an open query. The absence of Magnus Carlsen continues to loom giant over the game’s showcase occasion. The 33-year-old Norwegian has been ranked No 1 for greater than 14 straight years and was thought-about the world’s finest participant even earlier than he defeated Viswanathan Anand for the world championship in 2013. He strengthened his declare as the best participant of any period in 2021, when he crushed Nepomniachtchi in Dubai within the fourth protection of the title.
However Carlsen determined in opposition to defending it for a fifth time in 2023, citing an absence of motivation to undergo the months-long slog of preparation that championship matches demand. It marked solely the second time within the historical past of world title matchplay {that a} holder opted to not defend his crown after Bobby Fischer controversially forfeited the belt in 1975.
As a substitute, Ding defeated Nepomniatchi in an exciting match for the vacant title, even when critics together with longtime world champion Garry Kasparov branded it an “amputated” occasion with out the world’s finest participant concerned.
Kasparov has solely doubled down on that sentiment forward of this yr’s title match, saying:
My hottest take is that I don’t deal with it as a world championship match. For me a world championship match was at all times the match for the title of the perfect participant on the earth. I believe the historical past of the world championship matches, it began, by the way in which, right here in St Louis, with Steinitz going through Zukertort again in 1886, has ended with Magnus Carlsen. There have been 16 world champions, you may name them at each given second the perfect gamers. It’s those that took the title by beating the perfect participant. With all due respect, Ding taking part in Gukesh, it’s an essential occasion, it’s nonetheless a Fide occasion, it’s an ‘official title’, however nowadays with all the fashionable applied sciences, with chess getting quicker and quicker, with our lives getting additionally quicker, to maintain an antiquated system of qualification, 18 months or longer, to pick out the challenger, it’s not ample. … It’s an occasion that has nothing to do with the primary concept of the world championship – to determine, to outline the perfect participant on the planet.
Properly then!
Preamble
Good day and welcome to Singapore for day one of many world chess championship. Over the following few weeks, China’s Ding Liren and the fast-rising Indian teenager Gukesh Dommaraju will compete in a scheduled best-of-14-games match for the winner’s share of a $2.5m (£1.98m) prize fund on the Resorts World Sentosa, an island resort off Singapore’s southern coast. It’s the primary time within the 138-year historical past of world championship matchplay that two males from Asia will compete for the game’s most prestigious title.
Ding turned China’s first males’s world chess champion by defeating Ian Nepomniachtchi final yr on tiebreakers in Kazakhstan. Identified for his strong and exact taking part in fashion primarily based on creating small positional benefits from quiet openings, the 32-year-old from Zhejiang province is the highest-rated Chinese language participant of all time. A graduate of Peking College Legislation College, he as soon as went unbeaten in 100 straight classical video games, a document streak broken only by Magnus Carlsen in 2019.
Gukesh Dommaraju, generally often called Gukesh D, is an 18-year-old Indian prodigy who turned the third-youngest grandmaster in historical past at 12 years and 7 months. In April, at 17, the Chennai native shocked the chess institution by profitable the eight-man Candidates match in Toronto to become the youngest ever challenger for the world championship, ending high of a stacked discipline that included Nepomniachtchi, Hikaru Nakamura and Fabiano Caruana. An aggressive participant identified for utilizing sharp, tactical openings to create complicated positions aimed toward unsettling opponents, he can shatter the document for youngest ever undisputed world champion held by Garry Kasparov, who was 22 when he dethroned Karpov of their 1985 rematch in Moscow.
We’re an hour away from the ceremonial first transfer. Loads extra to return.
What time is Sport 1 of the Ding Liren v Gukesh Dommaraju World Chess Championship?
China’s Ding Liren is defending the world chess championship in opposition to fast-rising Indian teenager Gukesh Dommaraju. The perfect-of-14-games match is scheduled to happen from 23 November to fifteen December at Resorts World Sentosa for an general prize fund of $2.5m (£1.98m).
Enable content material supplied by a 3rd celebration?
This text contains content material hosted on lichess.org. We ask to your permission earlier than something is loaded, because the supplier could also be utilizing cookies and different applied sciences. To view this content material, click on ‘Enable and proceed’.
Bryan will likely be right here shortly.
