Eight officers stand on each side of the chessboard behind the phalanx of their pawns, ready to go into battle, the question being whether the king can be called an officer. He is above things and can be threatened, chased, cornered, checkmated, but he will never be beaten. He has eternal life, which can be comforting after a bitter defeat.
Sometimes the outcome of a game depends on the fortunes and woes of a single character, as was the case on Wednesday on the stage of the ballroom in the Hotel Equarius on the island of Sentosa, which belongs to the city state of Singapore. The world champion defends in a glass box Ding Liren from China won his title against Gukesh, the one-name challenger from India.
Ding has Black and a point lead in the match, and after a few standard moves of the Queen’s Gambit Declined, he moves his bishop to the f5 square to attack the White Queen. The valuable lady has to get out of the way, a gain in speed, how nice. A little later, however, Ding’s bishop is attacked by a pawn, and because he can’t really retreat well, he flees forward on the 10th move, deep into the white camp. He comes to a stop on the c2 square and stands there and stands for 14 moves while his situation becomes increasingly dark. Around 300 onlookers in the hall and millions on the screens ask themselves from turn to turn: What will become of this wanderer? Will he still get out of this, or will he be threatened with death?
Bishop gone, game gone, chess is that simple. So the game has found its theme, which shows itself in incessant brooding. Thing thinks and thinks and thinks. If anyone could read his thoughts, they would boil down to one question: How do I save this damn runner? Gukesh gives the answer on move 24: Not at all. The threatened runner neither has an escape space nor can he be reliably defended. He is silently destroyed by a white tower.
Because of all the pondering, Ding only has 20 minutes left of his two hours of thinking time, in which he now has to make 16 moves in order to pass the time control and get another 30 minutes on the clock. Runners gone, bad position, no time: even laypeople can guess how this will turn out.
Gukesh is only 18, the youngest challenger in World Cup history, it is his first fight for the title: Now he is very calm, takes his time, he has enough to meticulously calculate every movement on the board. He, who badly lost the first game of the duel on Monday, won’t give up victory in the third. Ding holds on until move 37; Then his last second passes and the position is gone. Applause erupts in the ballroom. You saw the world champion lose.
At the subsequent press conference, he sits on the podium and hangs his head, really hangs, for several minutes. He looks exactly how he feels. A defeated hero, if not an idiot: why, why did I have to accept such a variant? After the seventh move, he says, he no longer knew what to do.
Thing sags. And what does his king do? It’s still on the board in the glass case. But because the warm air in Singapore is so humid and the cooling units in the hall are so powerful, the window in front of the stage fogs up overnight. The king can no longer be seen.
There will be no play in Singapore on Thursday. The fourth game of the World Cup begins on Friday at 10 a.m. German time. You can find all of our chess reporter’s reports here.
