World Chess Championship 2023: Ian Nepomniachtchi and Ding Liren Vie for the Crown

Russia and China have been making headlines of late for their deepening bilateral ties, but for three weeks in April, two men from these respective countries will be locked in a fierce battle for the ultimate prize in professional chess – the title of world champion.

Admittedly, a bit of the air was taken out of this year’s event when five-time reigning world champion Magnus Carlsen of Norway declined to defend his title – a crown he maintained with a convincing victory over the same Nepomniachtchi in Dubai two years ago.

The next world champion of chess will be crowned at the conclusion of a 14-game match with classical time controls to be held over three weeks at the St. Regis Astana Hotel in Astana, Kazakhstan. The opening ceremony will be on April 7, with the first game slated for April 9.

If the players are tied after the 14 classical games, the champion will be decided in a series of tiebreaks with shorter time controls. Such an outcome would by no means be unprecedented: the 2018 World Championship match between Carlsen and American challenger Fabiano Caruana was decided by tiebreaks after all 12 classical games ended in draws.

Vying for the title will be 32-year-old Ian Nepomniachtchi from Russia, who will be competing under the flag of the world chess federation (FIDE), and 30-year-old Ding Liren from China.

Nepomniachtchi is making his second consecutive appearance in the championship match, having taken on Magnus Carlsen in Dubai in 2021. He qualified for this year’s event by winning the Candidates Tournament, a grueling double round-robin tournament featuring eight of the top players in the world.

Ding finished second to Nepomniachtchi in the Candidates Tournament but qualified to take on the Russian in Astana when Carlsen announced that he would not be defending his title.

Nepomniachtchi and Ding are ranked number two and three in the world FIDE rankings, respectively. The head-to-head record is three wins for Nepomniachtchi, two for Ding and eight draws.

The time control for the 14 classical games will be 120 minutes per side for the first 40 moves, 60 minutes for the next 20 moves and 15 minutes for the rest of the game, with 30 seconds added for each move starting on move 61.

The hefty €2 million prize fund for the match will be split 60% and 40% between the winner and runner-up.

On July 20, 2022, following the conclusion of the Candidates Tournament, Magnus Carlsen, the reigning world champion and the globe’s top-ranked player for over a decade, announced on his podcast that he would not be defending his title. “I am not motivated to play another match. I simply feel that I don’t have a lot to gain, I don’t particularly like it, and although I’m sure a match would be interesting for historical reasons and all of that, I don’t have any inclination to play and I will simply not play the match,” the world champion said.

Nearly all chess commentators acknowledge that Carlsen’s withdrawal takes a bit of the luster away from an event that has been held 48 times in various formats since its induction in 1886 – with the world’s number one player taking part in all but a few of them.

Nepomniachtchi grew up in the Russian city of Bryansk and learned to play chess at the age of four with the help of his grandfather. His prodigious talent became apparent early on and he quickly rose through the junior ranks. In 2000, he won the Under 10 European Championship and proceeded to garner several more European and world youth titles. However, Nepomniachtchi is a man with broad interests – including being a professional-level Dota 2 player – and for a long time he opted not to devote himself entirely to chess.

As a result, for many years he was considered a very strong grandmaster but not among the absolute elite. In 2013, when the 23-year-old Carlsen won his first world championship, the 23- year old Nepomniachtchi finished the year ranked just 29th in the world. Approaching his 30th birthday, Nepomniachtchi changed his approach, improved his work ethic, and eradicated much of the inconsistency that dogged him earlier in his career.

Ding hails from the Chinese city of Wenzhou and has accumulated an impressive set of accolades over his career. However, his more private nature and minimal visibility in the media and online blogosphere have kept him somewhat under the radar of many chess fans. In 2009, he burst onto the scene in earnest by going undefeated to win the Chinese Chess Championship at the age of 16. In 2015, he broke into the world top ten, becoming only the second Chinese player to accomplish that feat. In 2017-18, he put together a run of 100 straight games without a loss, a record streak at top-level chess at the time.

During the pandemic, Ding was often caught up in lockdowns in his hometown of Wenzhou. He was on the verge of missing the 2022 Candidates Tournament because he had not played enough games to qualify. The rules state that a player must have played 30 rated FIDE games over the past year. Ding had played only four with around a month to go before the deadline. In a bid to make the country’s top player eligible, the Chinese Chess Federation hastily organized several tournaments for Ding to play. He completed the punishing month-long quest with panache, notching 13 victories, 15 draws, and not a single defeat.

Elite professional chess is a sport that takes an enormous physical toll on those who compete at the top level. In 2018, a US-based company tracked the heart rates of chess players during a tournament. They found that in two hours of sitting and shuffling chess pieces around the board, Russian grandmaster Mikhail Antipov had burned 560 calories – roughly what a professional tennis player would burn in an hour of a singles match.

Stanford University researcher Robert Sapolsky believes that “grandmasters sustain elevated blood pressure for hours in the range found in competitive marathon runners.” Some chess players lose a noticeable amount of weight during competitions, sometimes as much as 4-5 kg during a ten-day tournament.

Ever since the Deep Blue chess computer defeated world champion Garry Kasparov in a match in 1996, computers have played an increasingly important role in chess. These days, the most powerful chess programs – called ‘engines’ – are capable of defeating even the top humans. Elite players run extensive computer analysis on chess positions and use engines to develop massive databases of opening moves and responses to parry common opening setups played by their opponents.

Nepomniachtchi has been at the forefront of taking advantage of such capabilities. Prior to the 2020-21 Candidates Tournament, Nepomniachtchi’s team reached out to the researchers at Moscow’s Skolkovo Institute of Technology in order to adapt a number of existing chess engines for an AI-based supercomputer cluster. The researchers agreed to help and allocated the Zhores supercomputer for his use. Zhores was designed for scientific research into machine learning and artificial intelligence but was adapted to allow Nepomniachtchi to evaluate tens of millions of chess positions per second.

“You’re more sure that your analysis is good when you see 500 million node positions than, say 100 million,” Nepomniachtchi said.

The majority of the chess commentators see Nepomniachtchi and Ding as fairly evenly matched. Financial Times chess writer Leonard Barden called Nepomniachtchi’s recent career record “slightly more convincing” and expects the Russian to win. Former world champion Garry Kasparov called both “very good players” and said picking between the two was “a very, very close call” before concluding that “Nepo has a slight edge though Ding is more stable than Nepo.” The betting odds are roughly 50-50.