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That was a absolutely horrible finish to a really exciting championship if you ask me. For anyone who doesn't know, there was a lot of drama because Gukesh was

That was a absolutely horrible finish to a really exciting championship if you ask me. For anyone who doesn't know, there was a lot of drama because Gukesh was playing amazingly coming into this (eg winning the gold medal on board 1 at the olympiad in crushing style) and Ding had been playing terribly. Then there were 13 games of back and forth with stalwart defending and imaginative computer preparation by both sides, playing a lot of fresh chess and both of them going for the most critical and challenging moves in each position. Ding was playing a lot better than a lot of people had expected and the previous game had been one of the best games in a world championship for a long time. Everything was tied going into the last game of the classical portion and the "bar room consensus" was that since Gukesh was so young and doesn't focus at all on the faster forms of chess (rapid and blitz) and is therefore much lower rated than Ding in those formats, that if this game was a draw then Ding would be a substantial favourite in the ensuing tiebreaks. The final game was a complex struggle, with Ding keeping everything in lockdown with the white pieces so as not to give Gukesh a ghost of a chance. Most of the pieces had been traded and it was the most drawish of drawn endgames. Gukesh was up a pawn, but they both had a rook and bishop and all Ding had to do was hang on to his pieces and keep them well away from the enemy king. On the stream I was watching IM David Pruess had just been asked by someone in chat whether Gukesh could win and he said "1% chance". Then all of a sudden Ding made 3 bad moves in a row. The first two were just poor endgame technique, putting his rook and bishop both on bad squares too close to the enemy king, then the real blunder. Completely inexplicably he traded off the pieces. Now he was in an endgame that was just dead lost. After 14 games of 4+ hours each It had gone from being a dead draw with him a big favourite in tie breaks to all over in a few seconds.

MrMcCall 2y ago
Gukesh took him into the deep water the entire time, putting every possible strain on Ding's energy and reserves. It was the unrelenting pressure of an 18yo badass that cracked Ding, whom I truly feel sorry for. He is a great player and a very, very nice human being. What is crazy is that Gukesh has only been playing chess for a little more than 11 years. ETA: And Ding fought like a lion!
- awongh 2y ago
  "only 11 years"... that seems like a lot to me, although reading further down in the thread it seems like it might take twice or three times as long to get to a very high level. Do people in the chess community measure players by number of years playing? Are there expectations of how long it takes to get to a certain level? (besides world champion)
  - neaden 2y ago
    It's hard to put it in numbers since high level chess players start very young, it's basically considered impossible to become a titled player learning chess as an adult, with a slight exception for high level players from similar games transferring over. So becoming the youngest champ and becoming the champ in the shortest time are very similar. For comparison Magnus started playing chess at 5 and became WC at 22.
    - awongh 2y ago
      5-22- so 17 years instead of 11. Quite a difference! Can any of that be put down to advances in training tech that wasn't around when Magnus started playing?
      - ANewFormation 2y ago
        In spite of claims to the contrary there is luck in chess. Your form (and your opponents') varies significantly over time, the outcome of competitive opening prep, or even just how well you're sleeping. The stars really aligned for Gukesh in countless ways, his form and openings hit when and where they needed to, and he was left playing a very out-of-form world champ who wasn't even in the top 20 in the world. I suspect his record (world champ at 18) will remain intact for many decades yet to come. He attributed much of his success to God, and even as an agnostic - I'm inclined to agree! Notably he's still nowhere near the strongest player in the world - he's not even the strongest Indian! The world championship in chess can be an odd beast at times.
fasdfdsava 2y ago
Wow great synopsis. Sounds like Ding just ran out of mental stamina just before buzzer.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
zmgsabst 2y ago
I think it was thematic of the match: The whole time, Ding had failed to seize advantages and been low on time — something criticized by GM Hikaru Nakamura. In this final game, those two things caused him to blunder in a complex endgame seeking a tie against Gukesh who had nearly an hour of advantage on the clock and been relentlessly pressing the whole match (and continued that pressure, into the endgame). That’s a strategy, not mere misfortune. And personally, I’m glad it was decided in the match rather than tie-breaks.
cyrillite 2y ago
It felt much more like forced error than unforced error or, thematically, the closest thing I’ve seen to a milling strategy in chess. Just make them keep drawing until they’re out of ideas.
- taneq 2y ago
  I'm explicitly not a chess player but this reminds me of Dave Sirlin's "Play To Win" where he starts by explaining that if doing a thing makes you not lose, you do that, and then eventually by definition you win.
  - fsckboy 2y ago
    chess has a lot of draws, and plenty of drawish strategies. Playing to not lose will not at all lead to winning.
    - chongli 2y ago
      Yes and if all you can do is draw in the world championship then you’ll be in trouble when the faster time controls are brought in to resolve the match.
  - pharrington 2y ago
    That kinda works for fighting games, since draws are rare, as the players need to either double KO or timeout with the same exact amount of health. Chess is very different in theres (at least) 3 ways to draw, and it's very easy to fumble a won position into a draw.
  - qq66 2y ago
    Not in chess, where the (by far) most likely outcome of a world championship classical game is a draw. When Magnus Carlsen played Fabiano Caruana for the world championship, EVERY classical game was a draw and they had to go to tiebreaks, which no longer makes it a classical tournament.
- thom 2y ago
  It was a forced error in the sense that Ding forced that exact endgame for no real reason and then fluffed it with 10 minutes on his clock plus increment. What's incredibly sad is that Ding clawed his way back into the match in game 12 by doing exactly what you describe - he created a horribly cramped position, refused to release the tension, and eventually Gukesh ran out of good moves and lost without any egregious blunders.
the_clarence 2y ago
> imaginative computer preparation Are people training AIs to play in the style of the people they're going to play against so they can practice?
- Fade_Dance 2y ago
  No, they use chess engines to find interesting lines of play that the opponent presumably is not prepared for. Say, an odd move that looks weak, but a few moves later is back at even, and the player that pushed down this line is now prepared to play on from there (with perhaps further traps laid ahead), while the opponent is somewhat in the dark and has to analyze the situation correctly.
  - optimalsolver 2y ago
    Has anyone tried playing one of these "chess engines" against a human? We may have an opportunity to cut out the middleman here (no pun intended).
    - bamboozled 2y ago
      Has anyone tried playing one of these "chess engines" against a human? Million times a day ?
    - neaden 2y ago
      To be clear the high level chess engines are so far above the best humans that there isn't a point anymore.
      - nurettin 2y ago
        Engines are unbelievable in open positions, so GMs who know that they are up against an engine usually just pawn lock the center and wait for the engine to start sacrificing in order to avoid a draw.
        2y ago
TeeMassive 2y ago
That's the most exciting and well written description of a chess game I've ever read!
- sourcepluck 2y ago
  You must not read very much chess writing!
mindfulmark 2y ago
Disagree. Gukesh was constantly putting pressure on Ding to find defensive moves and Ding finally made a mistake. The fact that it happened when it did just makes it even more dramatic. We know from the other matches that Ding is capable of finding them, and the fact that he didn't just highlights that they're both human, both under extreme pressure and that it's not just mindless computation.
- seanhunter 2y ago
  I'm not sure we disagree at all. Gukesh's strategy throughout the match was to constantly ask difficult questions and the surprise really was that Ding didn't fold earlier.
  - codeulike 2y ago
    So why call it a horrible finish?
    - lacksconfidence 2y ago
      Because the ending was pretty meh. All this excitement, and then Ding just flubs up an end game that most super gm's should be able to draw against stockfish. The best finale's are often when two players at their best duke it out, and one comes out on top. This was simply not Ding's best.
    - seanhunter 2y ago
      Because as a chess fan and just as a human being my heart goes out to Ding Liren who seems like a genuinely likeable and nice human being who has been open about the tremendous struggle he has had with mental health etc since winning the world championships. To pull himself out of a hole that deep and play really great chess for 13 and 9/10s matches and then lose it with a blunder at the last second is awful. And I say that as 100% someone who wanted Gukesh to win from the beginning, which is a result I think is great for chess and I think is “objectively correct” in the sense that he has played better chess and has been (apart from Magnus Carlsen and his compatriot Arjun Erigaisi who is also a complete monster) the story of the chess world for the last year.
seanhunter 2y ago
If anyone’s interested in what a GM’s thought process on the game looks like there’s a really great recap here which was produced without engines [1] https://youtu.be/97RZHG2rcbc?si=O41BRi2EC8Ryu0v2 https://youtu.be/97RZHG2rcbc?si=O41BRi2EC8Ryu0v2 [1] With the intention of trying to as honestly as possible replicate the situation for the players where obviously they have to think for themselves and don’t have access to an engine while playing.
- 8note 2y ago
  you can also take a look at anish giri's recaps: https://youtu.be/EQDpuPzps88?feature=shared https://youtu.be/EQDpuPzps88?feature=shared he streamed watching most of the openings, and kept his own eval bar on the side, occassionally checking his lines against strong engines
paulsutter 2y ago
Chess really baffles me Most of the more sophisticated people I know are completely disinterested in sports. Not that they dislike sports, it just never occupies their mind. Sports is a purposeless activity for kids Chess is different from sports in only one way: the loss of very intelligent capable people who could be helping to create the future. Chess is even more tragic than the olympics.
- not_kurt_godel 2y ago
  Intelligent people who create the future must choose that path for themselves. Chess isn't preventing people from making that choice. If chess didn't exist, most chess players would probably just be playing some other game instead of STEM careers or whatever your definition of creating the future is. Also plenty of very strong chess players do ultimately wind up pursuing other career paths. And then there's also the fact that a good number of the top chess players have shown themselves to be highly dysfunctional people who are unfit for the professional world such as Bobby Fischer and Vladimir Kramnik.
  - paulsutter 2y ago
    The stereotype of the absent-minded professor is a great illustration of how norms view the world. What WE see as focus, norms see as .. not conforming? Focus is crucial. To be great at chess you need to focus on it. To be great at creating the future you need to focus on it. By definition you can’t focus on both If you aren’t sacrificing, you aren’t focusing. I’m not saying you need to sacrifice everything else. But definitely you need to choose very carefully. ps. Creating the future is easy to define. Look at OpenAI, Starship, Optimus, mass scale photovoltaic manufacturing in China. Someone had to make those happen and it took focus
    - 11101010001100 2y ago
      Nevermind all that we learned from teaching chess to a computer. Ya a total waste.
      - 2y ago
itsoktocry 2y ago
I don't know much about chess, but this sounds like a downright unpredictable, exciting finish.
ANewFormation 2y ago
This really misses the key drama of what happened in the last game. Ding had a perfectly safe position where he could try to squeeze Gukesh pretty much endlessly with basically 0 risk. He then, completely inexplicably, went down a forced line which led to the final phase of the game. In this phase the position was drawn with perfect play, but that is completely irrelevant because it is really tough to play. And more importantly in this phase, Gukesh was the side pressing to win with all sorts of interesting ideas. Ding, by contrast, left himself in a position where he's now going to be tortured for hours, has 0 chance of winning, and a single lapse of concentration means you lose. And that's exactly what happened. Engine evals are really misleading in these sort of positions because it says it's completely equal, which it objectively is, but white/Ding will lose that position with some degree of regularity, while black/Gukesh had 0 losing chances. So in practical terms equality is not really correct.
- tomatovole 2y ago
  Is there a metric I can look at in engine evaluations to determine when a situation is "risky" for white or black (e.g., the situation above) even if it looks equal with perfect play? I've always been interested in understanding situations where this is the case (and the opposite, where the engine favours one side but it seems to require a long, hard-to-find sequence of moves. Playing out the top lines helps if equality requires perfect play from one side.
  - Leary 2y ago
    https://live.lczero.org/ https://live.lczero.org/
    - fernandopj 2y ago
      This is great, but I think that % is about the "correctness" of the move, not how likely it is to be played next.
      - RUnconcerned 2y ago
hilux 2y ago
I disagree completely. In the eyes of some modern fans, the popularity of engines and eval bars has reduced chess to an intellectual and computational exercise. It's too easy to say "bad moves" and "blunder" when Stockfish is giving you all the answers! In reality, chess is a fighting contest between two flesh-and-blood humans. And that's what we see throughout this exciting match, and in this final game. Gukesh won because of his greater fighting spirit throughout the match, which is as it should be. (Similar to how Ding played the daring move ...Rg6 in the final game of his match against Nepo.)
- benatkin 2y ago
  That isn't how most appreciate sports. People are hoping for the contenders to be at the top of their game towards the end of the championships. Nobody says "Hey, at least this has a human touch! I'm sick of basketball video games." if the NBA finals are relatively boring one year. I think maybe "that was a absolutely horrible finish" got interpreted as saying that the win wasn't well earned. That's not how I saw it at all.
  - hilux 2y ago
    > Nobody says "Hey, at least this has a human touch! I'm sick of basketball video games." if the NBA finals are relatively boring one year. Complete strawman. You are one of very few people who think this match was "relatively boring."
    - glenstein 2y ago
      I'm not seeing the strawman. You did say: >In reality, chess is a fighting contest between two flesh-and-blood humans And they weren't suggesting that the match was boring so far as I can tell, but more generally, they were responding to your idea that high level play is intellectualized in a way that loses the human touch.
      - hilux 2y ago
        By "strawman" I'm referring to use of "relatively boring" in the NBA parallel, as if that's a generally accepted description of this match.
EmberJune46 2y ago
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manojlds 2y ago
> imaginative computer preparation by both sides There was almost no preparation from Ding side. It was very weak.
nanoxide 2y ago
I have little interest in chess and no real knowledge in its current events beyond mainstream media coverage, but always enjoy lively writeups of the matches like this one.
fullwaza 2y ago
What a great breakdown, nicely done. You should be a chess commentator if you aren't already!
JshWright 2y ago
> After 14 games of 4+ hours each It had gone from being a dead draw with him a big favourite in tie breaks to all over in a few seconds. _Very_ casual chess follower here. Why was Ding a big favorite in the tie breaks? My takeaway from the match was that Ding seemed to always be worse on time, so wouldn't a shorter time control favor Gukesh?
- joshuamorton 2y ago
  Ding is rated over 100 points higher in rapid than Gukesh. The choice to spend time early was a choice by Ding and Ding's team. Ding is better at faster time controls than Gukesh, Gukesh was better prepared.
- Miraste 2y ago
  The World Chess Championship uses rapid and blitz matches (much shorter time controls) for tie breaks. Gukesh is 46th in the world in rapid, and 82nd in blitz. Ding is 2nd and 6th.
binarymax 2y ago
My best guess is he started feeling some time pressure and really wanted to trade for a clear draw, but crucially miscalculated the tempo and position of the K vs KP ending. I'm not a grandmaster though, so I can only vaguely speculate since that's how I would have lost :)
kopirgan 2y ago
All of sudden = time pressure brought on by opponent.
bothandeach 2y ago
Put yourself in Ding's place. OMG
ErigmolCt 2y ago
That said, Gukesh deserves credit for keeping the pressure on in a seemingly drawn position

MrMcCall 2y ago

Gukesh took him into the deep water the entire time, putting every possible strain on Ding's energy and reserves. It was the unrelenting pressure of an 18yo badass that cracked Ding, whom I truly feel sorry for. He is a great player and a very, very nice human being. What is crazy is that Gukesh has only been playing chess for a little more than 11 years. ETA: And Ding fought like a lion!

awongh 2y ago
"only 11 years"... that seems like a lot to me, although reading further down in the thread it seems like it might take twice or three times as long to get to a very high level. Do people in the chess community measure players by number of years playing? Are there expectations of how long it takes to get to a certain level? (besides world champion)
- neaden 2y ago
  It's hard to put it in numbers since high level chess players start very young, it's basically considered impossible to become a titled player learning chess as an adult, with a slight exception for high level players from similar games transferring over. So becoming the youngest champ and becoming the champ in the shortest time are very similar. For comparison Magnus started playing chess at 5 and became WC at 22.
  - awongh 2y ago
    5-22- so 17 years instead of 11. Quite a difference! Can any of that be put down to advances in training tech that wasn't around when Magnus started playing?
    - ANewFormation 2y ago
      In spite of claims to the contrary there is luck in chess. Your form (and your opponents') varies significantly over time, the outcome of competitive opening prep, or even just how well you're sleeping. The stars really aligned for Gukesh in countless ways, his form and openings hit when and where they needed to, and he was left playing a very out-of-form world champ who wasn't even in the top 20 in the world. I suspect his record (world champ at 18) will remain intact for many decades yet to come. He attributed much of his success to God, and even as an agnostic - I'm inclined to agree! Notably he's still nowhere near the strongest player in the world - he's not even the strongest Indian! The world championship in chess can be an odd beast at times.

fasdfdsava 2y ago

Wow great synopsis. Sounds like Ding just ran out of mental stamina just before buzzer.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

zmgsabst 2y ago

I think it was thematic of the match: The whole time, Ding had failed to seize advantages and been low on time — something criticized by GM Hikaru Nakamura. In this final game, those two things caused him to blunder in a complex endgame seeking a tie against Gukesh who had nearly an hour of advantage on the clock and been relentlessly pressing the whole match (and continued that pressure, into the endgame). That’s a strategy, not mere misfortune. And personally, I’m glad it was decided in the match rather than tie-breaks.

cyrillite 2y ago

It felt much more like forced error than unforced error or, thematically, the closest thing I’ve seen to a milling strategy in chess. Just make them keep drawing until they’re out of ideas.

taneq 2y ago
I'm explicitly not a chess player but this reminds me of Dave Sirlin's "Play To Win" where he starts by explaining that if doing a thing makes you not lose, you do that, and then eventually by definition you win.
- fsckboy 2y ago
  chess has a lot of draws, and plenty of drawish strategies. Playing to not lose will not at all lead to winning.
  - chongli 2y ago
    Yes and if all you can do is draw in the world championship then you’ll be in trouble when the faster time controls are brought in to resolve the match.
- pharrington 2y ago
  That kinda works for fighting games, since draws are rare, as the players need to either double KO or timeout with the same exact amount of health. Chess is very different in theres (at least) 3 ways to draw, and it's very easy to fumble a won position into a draw.
- qq66 2y ago
  Not in chess, where the (by far) most likely outcome of a world championship classical game is a draw. When Magnus Carlsen played Fabiano Caruana for the world championship, EVERY classical game was a draw and they had to go to tiebreaks, which no longer makes it a classical tournament.
thom 2y ago
It was a forced error in the sense that Ding forced that exact endgame for no real reason and then fluffed it with 10 minutes on his clock plus increment. What's incredibly sad is that Ding clawed his way back into the match in game 12 by doing exactly what you describe - he created a horribly cramped position, refused to release the tension, and eventually Gukesh ran out of good moves and lost without any egregious blunders.

the_clarence 2y ago

> imaginative computer preparation Are people training AIs to play in the style of the people they're going to play against so they can practice?

Fade_Dance 2y ago
No, they use chess engines to find interesting lines of play that the opponent presumably is not prepared for. Say, an odd move that looks weak, but a few moves later is back at even, and the player that pushed down this line is now prepared to play on from there (with perhaps further traps laid ahead), while the opponent is somewhat in the dark and has to analyze the situation correctly.
- optimalsolver 2y ago
  Has anyone tried playing one of these "chess engines" against a human? We may have an opportunity to cut out the middleman here (no pun intended).
  - bamboozled 2y ago
    Has anyone tried playing one of these "chess engines" against a human? Million times a day ?
  - neaden 2y ago
    To be clear the high level chess engines are so far above the best humans that there isn't a point anymore.
    - nurettin 2y ago
      Engines are unbelievable in open positions, so GMs who know that they are up against an engine usually just pawn lock the center and wait for the engine to start sacrificing in order to avoid a draw.
      - 2y ago

TeeMassive 2y ago

That's the most exciting and well written description of a chess game I've ever read!

sourcepluck 2y ago
You must not read very much chess writing!

mindfulmark 2y ago

Disagree. Gukesh was constantly putting pressure on Ding to find defensive moves and Ding finally made a mistake. The fact that it happened when it did just makes it even more dramatic. We know from the other matches that Ding is capable of finding them, and the fact that he didn't just highlights that they're both human, both under extreme pressure and that it's not just mindless computation.

seanhunter 2y ago
I'm not sure we disagree at all. Gukesh's strategy throughout the match was to constantly ask difficult questions and the surprise really was that Ding didn't fold earlier.
- codeulike 2y ago
  So why call it a horrible finish?
  - lacksconfidence 2y ago
    Because the ending was pretty meh. All this excitement, and then Ding just flubs up an end game that most super gm's should be able to draw against stockfish. The best finale's are often when two players at their best duke it out, and one comes out on top. This was simply not Ding's best.
  - seanhunter 2y ago
    Because as a chess fan and just as a human being my heart goes out to Ding Liren who seems like a genuinely likeable and nice human being who has been open about the tremendous struggle he has had with mental health etc since winning the world championships. To pull himself out of a hole that deep and play really great chess for 13 and 9/10s matches and then lose it with a blunder at the last second is awful. And I say that as 100% someone who wanted Gukesh to win from the beginning, which is a result I think is great for chess and I think is “objectively correct” in the sense that he has played better chess and has been (apart from Magnus Carlsen and his compatriot Arjun Erigaisi who is also a complete monster) the story of the chess world for the last year.

seanhunter 2y ago

If anyone’s interested in what a GM’s thought process on the game looks like there’s a really great recap here which was produced without engines [1] https://youtu.be/97RZHG2rcbc?si=O41BRi2EC8Ryu0v2 https://youtu.be/97RZHG2rcbc?si=O41BRi2EC8Ryu0v2 [1] With the intention of trying to as honestly as possible replicate the situation for the players where obviously they have to think for themselves and don’t have access to an engine while playing.

8note 2y ago
you can also take a look at anish giri's recaps: https://youtu.be/EQDpuPzps88?feature=shared https://youtu.be/EQDpuPzps88?feature=shared he streamed watching most of the openings, and kept his own eval bar on the side, occassionally checking his lines against strong engines

paulsutter 2y ago

Chess really baffles me Most of the more sophisticated people I know are completely disinterested in sports. Not that they dislike sports, it just never occupies their mind. Sports is a purposeless activity for kids Chess is different from sports in only one way: the loss of very intelligent capable people who could be helping to create the future. Chess is even more tragic than the olympics.

not_kurt_godel 2y ago
Intelligent people who create the future must choose that path for themselves. Chess isn't preventing people from making that choice. If chess didn't exist, most chess players would probably just be playing some other game instead of STEM careers or whatever your definition of creating the future is. Also plenty of very strong chess players do ultimately wind up pursuing other career paths. And then there's also the fact that a good number of the top chess players have shown themselves to be highly dysfunctional people who are unfit for the professional world such as Bobby Fischer and Vladimir Kramnik.
- paulsutter 2y ago
  The stereotype of the absent-minded professor is a great illustration of how norms view the world. What WE see as focus, norms see as .. not conforming? Focus is crucial. To be great at chess you need to focus on it. To be great at creating the future you need to focus on it. By definition you can’t focus on both If you aren’t sacrificing, you aren’t focusing. I’m not saying you need to sacrifice everything else. But definitely you need to choose very carefully. ps. Creating the future is easy to define. Look at OpenAI, Starship, Optimus, mass scale photovoltaic manufacturing in China. Someone had to make those happen and it took focus
  - 11101010001100 2y ago
    Nevermind all that we learned from teaching chess to a computer. Ya a total waste.
    - 2y ago

itsoktocry 2y ago

I don't know much about chess, but this sounds like a downright unpredictable, exciting finish.

ANewFormation 2y ago

This really misses the key drama of what happened in the last game. Ding had a perfectly safe position where he could try to squeeze Gukesh pretty much endlessly with basically 0 risk. He then, completely inexplicably, went down a forced line which led to the final phase of the game. In this phase the position was drawn with perfect play, but that is completely irrelevant because it is really tough to play. And more importantly in this phase, Gukesh was the side pressing to win with all sorts of interesting ideas. Ding, by contrast, left himself in a position where he's now going to be tortured for hours, has 0 chance of winning, and a single lapse of concentration means you lose. And that's exactly what happened. Engine evals are really misleading in these sort of positions because it says it's completely equal, which it objectively is, but white/Ding will lose that position with some degree of regularity, while black/Gukesh had 0 losing chances. So in practical terms equality is not really correct.

tomatovole 2y ago
Is there a metric I can look at in engine evaluations to determine when a situation is "risky" for white or black (e.g., the situation above) even if it looks equal with perfect play? I've always been interested in understanding situations where this is the case (and the opposite, where the engine favours one side but it seems to require a long, hard-to-find sequence of moves. Playing out the top lines helps if equality requires perfect play from one side.
- Leary 2y ago
  https://live.lczero.org/ https://live.lczero.org/
  - fernandopj 2y ago
    This is great, but I think that % is about the "correctness" of the move, not how likely it is to be played next.
    - RUnconcerned 2y ago

hilux 2y ago

I disagree completely. In the eyes of some modern fans, the popularity of engines and eval bars has reduced chess to an intellectual and computational exercise. It's too easy to say "bad moves" and "blunder" when Stockfish is giving you all the answers! In reality, chess is a fighting contest between two flesh-and-blood humans. And that's what we see throughout this exciting match, and in this final game. Gukesh won because of his greater fighting spirit throughout the match, which is as it should be. (Similar to how Ding played the daring move ...Rg6 in the final game of his match against Nepo.)

benatkin 2y ago
That isn't how most appreciate sports. People are hoping for the contenders to be at the top of their game towards the end of the championships. Nobody says "Hey, at least this has a human touch! I'm sick of basketball video games." if the NBA finals are relatively boring one year. I think maybe "that was a absolutely horrible finish" got interpreted as saying that the win wasn't well earned. That's not how I saw it at all.
- hilux 2y ago
  > Nobody says "Hey, at least this has a human touch! I'm sick of basketball video games." if the NBA finals are relatively boring one year. Complete strawman. You are one of very few people who think this match was "relatively boring."
  - glenstein 2y ago
    I'm not seeing the strawman. You did say: >In reality, chess is a fighting contest between two flesh-and-blood humans And they weren't suggesting that the match was boring so far as I can tell, but more generally, they were responding to your idea that high level play is intellectualized in a way that loses the human touch.
    - hilux 2y ago
      By "strawman" I'm referring to use of "relatively boring" in the NBA parallel, as if that's a generally accepted description of this match.

EmberJune46 2y ago

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manojlds 2y ago

> imaginative computer preparation by both sides There was almost no preparation from Ding side. It was very weak.

nanoxide 2y ago

I have little interest in chess and no real knowledge in its current events beyond mainstream media coverage, but always enjoy lively writeups of the matches like this one.

fullwaza 2y ago

What a great breakdown, nicely done. You should be a chess commentator if you aren't already!

JshWright 2y ago

> After 14 games of 4+ hours each It had gone from being a dead draw with him a big favourite in tie breaks to all over in a few seconds. _Very_ casual chess follower here. Why was Ding a big favorite in the tie breaks? My takeaway from the match was that Ding seemed to always be worse on time, so wouldn't a shorter time control favor Gukesh?

joshuamorton 2y ago
Ding is rated over 100 points higher in rapid than Gukesh. The choice to spend time early was a choice by Ding and Ding's team. Ding is better at faster time controls than Gukesh, Gukesh was better prepared.
Miraste 2y ago
The World Chess Championship uses rapid and blitz matches (much shorter time controls) for tie breaks. Gukesh is 46th in the world in rapid, and 82nd in blitz. Ding is 2nd and 6th.

binarymax 2y ago

My best guess is he started feeling some time pressure and really wanted to trade for a clear draw, but crucially miscalculated the tempo and position of the K vs KP ending. I'm not a grandmaster though, so I can only vaguely speculate since that's how I would have lost :)

kopirgan 2y ago

All of sudden = time pressure brought on by opponent.

bothandeach 2y ago

Put yourself in Ding's place. OMG

ErigmolCt 2y ago

That said, Gukesh deserves credit for keeping the pressure on in a seemingly drawn position