IMAGE: China’s Ding Liren competes towards Ian Nepomniachtchi in the course of the World Championship match 2023 tie-break, in Astana, Kazakhstan, on Sunday. Photograph: Vladislav Vodnev/Reuters
China’s Ding Liren was topped on Sunday because the seventeenth world chess champion in a tense match towards Russian-born Ian Nepomniachtchi in Astana, Kazakhstan, within the final chapter of an odds-defying sequence of occasions.
Thirty-year-old Ding received the speedy chess playoff by 2.5 factors to 1.5, capitalizing on Nepomniachtchi’s errors in time bother within the final of the shorter-format video games, following the pair’s 7-7 tie in a psychological battle throughout 14 longer “classical” video games.
“One Ding to rule em all,” fellow grandmaster Anish Giri wrote on Twitter in honour of the brand new champion.
Ding’s triumph means China holds each the lads’s and girls’s world titles, with present girls’s champion Ju Wenjun set to defend her title towards compatriot Lei Tingjie in July.
“The second Ian resigned the sport was a really emotional second, I can’t management my emotions,” the brand new world champion stated in a press convention.
Ding had leveled the rating within the common portion of the match with a dramatic win in recreation 12, regardless of a number of essential moments – together with a purported leak of his personal preparation.
The Chinese grandmaster takes the crown from five-time world champion Magnus Carlsen of Norway, who defeated Nepomniachtchi in 2021 however introduced in July he wouldn’t defend the title once more this 12 months.
Carlsen stated he was not motivated to play shortly after Nepomniachtchi received the Candidates event, the celebrated qualifier to the match.
Ding, runner-up within the Candidates thanks to an unimaginable second half of the occasion, was subsequent in line.
He had solely been invited to the event on the final minute to substitute Russia’s Sergey Karjakin, whom the worldwide chess federation (FIDE) banned for his vocal assist of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Ding ranks third within the FIDE score record behind Carlsen and Nepomniachtchi.
The new champion will attend from May 4 the primary event of the Grand Chess Tour in Bucharest, Romania, after being virtually inactive since 2020 due to COVID-19 lockdowns in China.
