2024 World Championship (25 November to 13 December)

[Christopher Kreuzer]

BBC News have an article on this now:

Indian teen becomes youngest world chess champion

Standard of reporting not great (mixing 'game' and 'match').

But he [Ding] had put in a strong opening game and won the last match against Dommaraju, suggesting momentum.

Also not using the correct form of address (Gukush D) is less forgivable.

[Christopher Kreuzer]

Better article from The Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/ ... ding-liren

[Ian Thompson]

Standard of reporting not great (mixing 'game' and 'match').

But he [Ding] had put in a strong opening game and won the last match against Dommaraju, suggesting momentum.

Also not using the correct form of address (Gukush D) is less forgivable.

The author clearly can't count either:

Both players had two victories apiece and eight draws going into the final game on Thursday.

[Nick Ivell]

My feeling is that Ding's openings were unsatisfactory throughout. With his total lack of prep, he did pretty well!

[Christopher Kreuzer]

Standard of reporting not great (mixing 'game' and 'match').

But he [Ding] had put in a strong opening game and won the last match against Dommaraju, suggesting momentum.

Also not using the correct form of address (Gukush D) is less forgivable.

The author clearly can't count either:

Both players had two victories apiece and eight draws going into the final game on Thursday.

I missed that.

It was endgame from there.

Is cute (but still wrong).

[Matt Mackenzie]

How does Ding's "final game blunder" rate historically?

Its bad, but certainly not as bad as Chigorin allowing mate in 2 despite a better if not winning position against Steinitz.

[Christopher Kreuzer]

The BBC article now has a byline (so I should maybe be less critical now that someone is putting their name to this - FWIW, "BBC World News senior journalist and editor in London, prev on Asia and Aus desks"), but the reporting in the BBC article (last updated 32 minutes ago) still makes me wince:

Playing on black, Dommaraju won the game after Ding, who had been in a solid position, made a fatal foolish move that gave up his last powerful piece.

If you are going to report on events like this, just leave out descriptions like that if you don't know how to write about chess (sorry).

Maybe someone should actually point out the numerical error that Ian noticed? "Going into the final game on Thursday, Dommaraju and Ding had eight draws and two wins apiece." - it should be nine draws of course. Made worse by the fact that it then immediately explains the scoring system, allowing readers to work out themselves the error.

To be fair, the rest of the article is good, and should raise interest in the game. So I might stop checking back for 'updates'.

[Paul Cooksey]

It reminded me a bit of the Kasparov's game 24 win against Karpov. Of course this is a much harder position to hold and we did not have the eval bar to tell us 45...h5 was a fatal error so we could type blunder in the chat.

It does seem a bit disrespectful to Kasparov making the comparison. But I feel justified since he has been disrespectful about the whole event ("Carlsen was the 16th and last champion")

kk24.png (788.52 KiB) Viewed 6012 times

[Nick Ivell]

To me, it wasn't so much the blunder as the whole game which was poor by Ding. You don't play like that as White!

[Paul Cooksey]

The two famous last games I thought of were Kasparov (above). Arguably the most important game of his career. He played a slow Reti with the idea of a a long tense game. Not so far from Ding's approach. Carlsen took the exact opposite approach in the last game against Caruana, no attempt to win at all, straight to the playoff.

With hindsight Ding should have chosen the other way. But he wouldn't play Ba8 with hindsight either

[Joey Stewart]

One thing that struck me about this match was just how complementary and humble both players were towards each other - not even a hint of bad blood, which is very rare in world championships.

[Jonathan Rogers]

Easy quiz question:

In terms of patterns of results, this match bucked a trend which has emerged since Kasparov v Karpov 1990. What did this match have in common with only Kramnik v Leko and Kramnik v Topalov since that time?

[IM Jack Rudd]

Both players won with black?

[Neil Graham]

Alex Therrien who is a FIDE master is a senior digital journalist for the BBC. Perhaps they should have asked him to write the page.

[Paul Habershon]

https://indianexpress.com/article/sport ... p-9721733/