Ding Liren and his play may have been shaky in game 1 of his World Championship match with Ian Nepomniachtchi, but today was an outright nightmare. It started strangely, and then went completely downhill, Wil E. Coyote style. Fortunately, it’s just one game, and like the Coyote he can go back to the old drawing board. (For his sake, Ding should not get his openings from ACME.)
The game began with the Queen’s Gambit Declined, and then Ding uncorked the rather odd 4.h3. Nepomniachtchi smiled, thought for nine minutes, and made the reasonable decision to turn it into a Queen’s Gambit Accepted in which the move h2-h3 had little value. They wound up with a position very similar to a 2021 Ding vs. Levon Aronian game in which White had played Re1 instead of h3, and the differences were all in favor of the earlier game.
Still, Ding wasn’t worse at that point, but once he played 13.e4 things started going wrong, and fast. Five or six moves later he was lost, and by move 24 the position was resignable. The rout was on, and facing heavy material losses he threw in the towel after Black’s 29th move. Nepo played well, but it was at least as much a function of Ding’s playing awful chess. (For the game and my comments, have a look here.)
This has plenty of precedent: many first-time world championship contestants have started in a nervy way before settling down. Tigran Petrosian lost a terrible first game of his match against Mikhail Botvinnik (he felt that he played that game at the level of a first category player [roughly 2100]) before calming down and winning the match. Boris Spassky didn’t manage a single win in his first match with Petrosian until game 13. Bobby Fischer lost game 1 against Spassky in bizarre fashion, and then forfeited game 2 before getting his wits (or maybe more accurately, helping destroy Spassky’s psychological equilibrium). Garry Kasparov was down 5-0 against Anatoly Karpov, and down 4-0 after just nine games in their first match. Of these four cases, only Spassky (against Petrosian) eventually lost the match in question, and even there Spassky managed to equalize the scores before Petrosian regained the lead.
So, it’s still early for Ding, and he has time to settle down and play his best chess. Tomorrow is a rest day, and that should help. It will be important for him to survive game 3 with Black, and if he does that and then plays a good game with White, he should be fine. A one-point deficit is not fatal, especially against a sharp and combative player like Nepo. (On the other hand, if he doesn’t manage to get better opening positions than he did in the first two games, it’s extremely unlikely that he’ll succeed.)