Ding Liren Is Struggling
There were signs that something might be troubling Ding Liren before he had even won the World Chess Championship. At a press conference after the drawn first game of his 2023 title match with Ian Nepomniachtchi, Ding said that he was not happy and feeling a little depressed. He half-joked that it felt like something was wrong with his mind, that he was flooded with emotions and memories and had trouble thinking about any prepared lines. Ding was still intermittently brilliant throughout the series, finding a checkmate in game six that completely eluded fellow Grandmasters out of an opening that had never been used in a World Championship. But then under time trouble in the seventh game, he froze horrifyingly, unable to locate a decent move. Still, he persevered. After several weeks and fourteen games, the classical portion of the match finished tied.
During tiebreakers in the faster rapid format, Ding seized the moment. Rather than acquiescing to what looked to be another drawn position, he put his own rook in an extremely dangerous pin and pushed his pawns for the win. Top-tier players are meticulous about playing to a standoff when they need to, but winning games requires making yourself vulnerable. Ding claims that this was not a psychological decision, but a positional one. He favored Nepomniachtchi’s chances if the tie break games proceeded to blitz and he matter-of-factly calculated it as the best move. At least from a novice’s perspective, it would have taken incredible resolve.
The commentators could not believe Ding’s choice, but it opened a window to attack. The moments while Ding’s pawns crept toward promotion offered a tiny glimpse of what players put into these matches. As his second chance at a Championship slipped away, Nepomniachtchi’s body betrayed him and he crumbled. He gazed off into the distance and his nervous system short circuited, his arm unwittingly scattering the captured material on the side of the board. After extending his hand in resignation, he almost tipped over his chair trying to extricate himself from it. Ding Liren was the first new World Champion since Magnus Carlsen.
What followed for Ding, both at the board and away from it, to the extent that those domains can ever really be decoupled, has been a struggle. After winning the title last year, the champion withdrew from multiple tournaments and took a long, somewhat mysterious break from competitive play. In the few events he has entered since, he has lost frequently and uncharacteristically. His game, and at times his demeanor, have seemed badly out of sorts. In June, on the open side of the Norway Chess invitational Ding finished in last place out of six. It was not close; in one of his losses he entirely overlooked a mate-in-two threat, a regular occurrence for your average online bullet schlub but an utter catastrophe for a super Grandmaster with half an hour left on their clock.
Initially, at least outside of Chinese-language media, news about the situation was hard to come by. There were rumblings amongst fans and eventually confirmation of some sort of ailment, but details were sparse. In April of 2024, a year after his victory, Ding gave an interview to the German paper Die Tageszeitung about his absence and poor results. Ding said that he had been dealing with problems sleeping, exhaustion, and depression. He said he was getting medical treatment, which had helped, and that he was getting better slowly. Notably, he also talked about life beyond chess, about enjoying football and basketball, and especially playing table tennis with his father. When asked if he thought he was too sensitive, or not egotistical enough to be a great player, he replied patly that he tries to be a nice person.
In retrospect, the radio silence about his physical and mental health issues was eminently understandable, but even the afterglow of Ding’s title win now seemed somewhat ominous. Following his victory, he had admitted that leading up to the Championship match he had considered retiring if he lost, or at least pulling back from competitive play. He revealed that halfway through the series he had felt his motivation to win wane. Ding said he had mixed feelings upon becoming the World Champion; he was proud, but the victory meant that he would also have to devote more time to chess.
There is an acute and maybe inherent tendency to play armchair psychiatrist where chess is concerned. To the degree that any public figure is allowed to be, Ding has been reserved about the details of his diagnosis, and those specifics should be his to navigate. But more generally, explaining some of what Ding is going through requires talking about the practical realities of top level chess.
Our society does not encourage viewing any of its spectacles pragmatically, but chess comes with its own set of complications. To be both deemed incomprehensible and packaged as consumable entertainment, the game must be reduced to broad strokes. A real activity with a concrete vocabulary is replaced by a too perfect vehicle for metaphors and signifiers. At various times the game has been abstracted out to a parlor trick, a talk show novelty, or a crude proxy for great power competition. More recently, it’s been appropriated as an ecosystem for obscure streaming drama and distraction, but the contemporary spike in the game’s popularity notwithstanding, in most of the world actually following the sport remains a relatively niche interest.
As much as this has warped the understanding of the game itself, it’s been just as distorting for the perception of its players. What we know of Bobby Fischer is more accurately the construction and deconstruction of a genius who was, for a while, an American hero. The Bobby Fischer who was grappling with something never quite diagnosed, and who was virulently antisemitic, doesn’t quite fit in that frame. We might recognize Garry Kasparov, too, but not really. The hothead Kasparov who cheated against the 17-year-old Judit Polgár and when challenged on it said, “I think a girl of her age should be taught some good manners before making such statements”? The outspokenly political Kasparov with a dizzying range of opinions, some of them brave and many others utterly repellent? These are too convoluted for a TV news sound bite. We do know a theatrical version of Josh Waitzkin, trained by Laurence Fishburne and Ben Kingsley in Searching For Bobby Fischer; we know the entirely fictional Beth Harmon, from The Queen’s Gambit. They’re knowable precisely because they’re nothing but a collection of those metaphors and signifiers, instead of complicated humans with limitations and failings.
Magnus Carlsen is on the short list of the best to ever do it. He became a Grandmaster at age 13 and starting in 2013 he won five straight World Championships. He is the number one ranked FIDE classical player, and has been, uninterrupted, for over a dozen years. You could go on listing these accolades, but doing so only adds to the abstraction; there’s also a person under that resume somewhere. Even after relinquishing some of his aura of invincibility, Carlsen is still universally accepted as the best player alive. The reason that he no longer holds the World Champion moniker is not because he was beaten. As the 2023 match approached, Carlsen decided that while he was not really retiring, he could no longer motivate himself to grind through another grueling cycle in this current format and vacated the title. He has continued winning less arduous competitions, in various formats, since.
Magnus’s abdication is what opened the double-edged opportunity for Ding and Nepomniachtchi to vie for the crown. Even for the preternaturally talented, high level chess is a trial. The World Championship which Ding now holds, with all its additional prep and pressure, is just the most heightened expression of this gauntlet. Professional chess is a mentally and physically taxing series of geometry problems solved on a knife’s edge. The games themselves involve focusing for hours on end, for days or weeks at a time, while living itinerantly in hotels, in countries where you might not speak the language or like the food. (During a tournament Ding once joked that he was happy with his play, but worried that he was going to run out of the rice he had brought.) Under these conditions, it is possible for a player to produce a nearly flawless performance, almost on par with the best computer chess engines, and then blunder it away with a single lapse in concentration.
Before that, though, the training and preparation required to even reach those games can be all-encompassing. Even by the standards of other ultra-competitive pursuits, success in this field has not always correlated positively with a well-rounded lifestyle or robust mental health. Spending years staring at a grid of squares while a clock ticks down, trying to write mathematical proofs in your head, in a language that most people do not even know exists, is by all appearances not any easier than it sounds.
In April, just after Ding’s Die Tageszeitung interview, Magnus Carlsen appeared on the Norwegian Sjakksnakk podcast (“Chess Talk,” in English). He worried that Ding might be “sort of permanently broken” and hoped that he might make a comeback to his previous form. “What has happened to him after the World Championship match should make people, general chess fans as well as other professionals, realize how tough these events actually are,” Carlsen said. “Because we’re now a year removed from his World Championship, and there aren’t a lot of signs that he’s recovered from that.”
Financially, Magnus Carlsen appears to be Doing Just Fine. Below the uppermost sliver of the rankings though, the monetary rewards for playing chess are variable and fleeting. In most places the game is not a substantial box office draw; only a small number of players can live off of full-time tournament play alone. If you are lucky enough to make it to the top, even a modest drop in Elo points could still mean that event invites and sponsorships dry up. Not much further down the ladder, where the paydays get even more sporadic, the game supports another thin section of pros who supplement their competitive paydays by teaching lessons, running clubs, authoring books and courses, acting as seconds for other GMs, commentating, and increasingly, broadcasting their exploits on streaming platforms.
Combined with the proliferation of online play and the improvement of engines, the streaming boom has helped drive interest in chess, and opened new avenues for some people to carve out a living around the game. It’s also created some unusual dynamics. For example, according to American GM Fabiano Caruana, Levy “GothamChess” Rozman, the most popular chess streamer, makes more money than even Carlsen. Rozman possesses chess abilities that a normal player like me can barely imagine, but he’s only an International Master. There are thousands of players in the world as good or better than he is. His job revolves around something other than skill on the board alone; it entails posting clips with shocked-face thumbnails and tabloid titles to appease the algorithmic overseers, and synergizing clout with other names like Hikaru Nakamura, Andrea Botez, and Anna Cramling.
This is still work, often unsteady and seldom lucrative work at that. Being, or at least portraying, a captivating character who is willing to turn portions of their life into a public broadcast for masses of viewers requires a very different toolset and disposition than simply playing the game. Social media has been integral to the chess boom, but its imperatives and incentives have also seeped into every level of competition. Caruana himself has started a podcast and taken to posting clips to YouTube. The two jobs of player and public personality are ever-more-difficult to separate, and all the more so for the always scrutinized post of World Champion.
Before the start of the Norway Chess, Ding was asked by The Indian Express about Carlsen’s comments and how he was feeling. After the World Championship he was exhausted and ill, he confirmed, “but now I can say that I have recovered from my illness.” Taking time off had made the crown seem a little lighter and he was more relaxed. Still, he was pragmatic. He knew that his chess was much weaker than it had been two years ago and that his goal for such a stacked tournament was just to avoid last place. He couldn’t manage that, and his performance would underline the questions about his well-being.
The tournament included a unique production gimmick to cater to the newfound streaming audience: a confession booth that players could duck into mid-match to discuss their games. In the midst of his toils, Ding did not seem to be interested in participating. Hikaru Nakamura, on the other hand, ate up the occasion. An absurdly fast calculator and one of the best players in the US, in recent years Nakamura has parlayed his talents into being an entertainer — a streamer, parasocial brand, and the kind of personality who says the word “memes” a lot. He now describes himself as a content creator rather than a professional chess player.
Nakamura is 36, and like almost all the pros, has been at it since he was very young. While streaming is far from an easy job, this move initially seemed like a sort of semi-retirement, at least from the stress of playing at the top levels of the competitive classical game. Perhaps counterintuitively, Nakamura continued playing superb chess. It’s possible that taking things less seriously and focusing less manically on preparation had their own benefits. During a confession booth interview, in the process of handing Ding yet another loss, Nakamura said, “I’ve played Ding many times, we’re colleagues over the years, but he definitely doesn’t seem like the same person.” He said Ding appeared to be literally shaking at the table and that it was hard not to feel bad for him. “So it’s kind of awkward, actually, because he just doesn’t seem right,” Nakamura said.
It was in the next round, in the midst of playing from last place, when Ding blundered mate-in-two. His opponent was Magnus Carlsen. Carlsen saw the mistake instantly and his face fell as soon as the move was on the board. He barely hesitated before sacking his queen to finish the game, but he did it with the expression of an executioner who despises his job. After the game he said, “I wish him well. I hope he gets better.”
Later, in an interview with Susan Ninan for the Hindustan Times, Ding said his early results at Norway Chess were so bad he considered withdrawing from the tournament. “I’m here as If I’m not here. It’s the real me, not a fake one,” he laughed. “It’s just the worst version of me.” Ultimately he decided to stay and keep playing. He was just trying to stop the bleeding by then, but he was taking solace in the steps he could take.
Against Caruana, he had finessed good positions in both their classical game and armageddon, before they petered out to draws. “But it showed that I can still compete at the highest level,” he said. In his rematch against Nakamura, Ding played rock solid, drawing their classical game and earning a crisp win in armageddon. He reiterated that, with treatment, his mental condition has stabilized from its post-World Championship lows. Still, he allowed, “to think carefully, to think longer, to totally focus on the game is what I’m finding most challenging.” He knows that many people see him as an idol, but at the moment he’s not thinking about winning tournaments. He just wants to improve enough to challenge the world’s best players again. A Juventus fan, Ding referenced the team’s forward Federico Chiesa, who had to recover from an ACL injury, as an inspiration (Chiesa has since transferred to Liverpool).
There is an ideology that argues the sum total of people’s value, including those that provide entertainment or push the bounds of human accomplishment, comes down to their efficiency and productivity. This belief is held most strongly by those with personal fortunes and concerns about how labor costs might slow their growth, but has unfortunately also filtered down from there. It’s a system that does not understand the difference between Stockfish, a chess program that plays hundreds of rating points above anyone who has ever lived, and someone who fell in love with chess while studying Mikhail Tal games as a child. Its values would deem the computer superior not just because it can find better moves, but because it will never get hungry or sad. This way of thinking downplays the work it takes to make society operate and to make life in it worthwhile in ways I find deplorable, but it also seems to me a grave misunderstanding of the human condition. Mortality and frailty can never be optimized out of the equation; they bear on everything, every step of the way.
Ding Liren, who enjoys reading philosophy, seems to understand this. After his Championship win, while discussing how he has faced his professional and emotional challenges with Leontxo García in El País, he referenced the Chinese title of a poetry collection by Louise Glück. The title is a line taken from her poem “Omens,” and reads: Until the World Reflects the Deepest Needs of the Soul.
At the end of the year, Ding is scheduled to face 18-year-old prodigy Dommaraju Gukesh in Singapore for the World Chess Championship title. Plenty can change between now and then, but given their comparative forms at the moment, Gukesh looks to be heavily favored. As a preview, in August the two were paired in the first round of the Sinquefield Cup, Ding’s first classical tournament since the Norway Chess. They played to a draw, but Ding’s analysis afterward seemed tentative, in the words of GM Daniel King, “just a little bit pessimistic in these variations.”
Ding would also draw his next five matches. Then, in a high-tension game with eventual tournament winner Alireza Firouzja, he flinched first and Firouzja steamrolled him. “That’s worrying for those of us that are Ding fans. He seemed to just crack at a certain moment,” said King. In the next round, misreading his advantage, Ding bailed out to a draw from an objective lead. “That is really not great,” lamented GM Peter Svidler from the analysis board. “We don’t really want to speculate on his frame of mind, but we do know that he just accepted a three-fold [repetition] in a position where he was significantly better with precisely zero risk,” said Svidler. “The game shows I played good moves, but I didn’t evaluate well,” Ding said post-game. He laughed and tried to continue, “I’m too…” but couldn’t find the word. After a loss in the final round, Ding would finish with 0 wins, 7 draws, and 2 losses, in a tie for eighth out of ten players.
The Sinquefield Cup was followed by the 45th FIDE Chess Olympiad. Gukesh played sublimely on the first board for India’s open section team and led them to a gold medal performance. Ding did not generate a single win for China, who played well overall but finished in fourth.
Despite his struggles and the odds against him, Ding is planning to go ahead with his title defense in November. It’s possible that some of his readings, which he says have made him a better player, are motivating him. When discussing the final classical game of the 2023 Championship, a ninety-move marathon where Ding was repeatedly threatened while needing a draw to survive to tiebreaks, Ding brought up Camus. “I remembered how Albert Camus talks about the concept of resistance,” Ding told El País. “The idea is that if you see that you cannot win, do everything in your power to resist,” he said, “And that memory gave me the determination I needed.”
