Bengaluru: Reigning world champion Ding Liren is “worried about losing badly” to 18-year-old challenger, D Gukesh from India in their title match later this month. In a forthright interview to Magnus Carlsen’s TakeTakeTake YouTube channel, recorded on the final day of the Olympiad in September, Ding called himself the clear underdog and expressed hope of summoning a different version of himself at the board for the match, one that is significantly better than what he’s shown of late.

“Clearly, I’ll be the underdog approaching this match…Gukesh is in top form…I hope I can become a totally different player and at least give him a fight to slow down his pace… to have some winning chances,” said Ding.

Ding – who went unbeaten for 100 classical games between August 2017 and November 2018 hasn’t had a win since Wijk Aan Zee at the beginning of this year. “This is the longest I have gone without a classical win…. Maybe I’m not so eager to play…I don’t have the same ambitions to win… I’m worried about losing very badly (to Gukesh), hopefully it won’t happen.”

Ding is perhaps right now in “rush mode” as he calls it, for the match that begins in Singapore on November 25. He offered that though the Indian teen is in imperious form, he doesn’t fear him. “I’ve only lost to him (Gukesh) in freestyle chess, not in classical. So maybe I can give him a fight…I hope you will see the same me from the last world championship match. Although I’m playing so badly, still so many players love and support me, so maybe I need to show that I deserve this kind of support. If I continue to play so badly without any fighting spirit, I may not deserve it.”

Fellow GMs Wesley So and Anish Giri weighed in, and hoped there’s a turnaround in the offing.

“I don’t think the match will last the full 14 games…clearly there’s something wrong with him (Ding), maybe it’s related to the federation, the pandemic and the Chinese government… maybe they expect too much from him,” said So. “Ding has nothing to lose. He has already won the biggest title in chess. Even if he doesn’t win anything else, he’s set for life.”

“I heard Vishy Anand say that whenever he was down for a very long time, what helped him come back up is to finally accept it,” Giri pointed out, “The moment you accept it, is often the moment that things begin to turn around.”

Ding just needs to ask himself what he would have done five years ago: Carlsen

Five-time world champion Carlsen believes that Ding cannot afford to make safe choices on the board at the match and needs to find a way to make good of the chances he’s likely to get against Gukesh.

“I don’t think you can prepare for the intensity of the Championship without actually playing it. A lot of people find it tough to both play it and recover from it. What I think has happened with Ding is that he has not completely recovered from that World Championship yet and you could argue that the only thing that could make him completely recover is to win this one,” Carlsen told TakeTakeTake.

“You can sense when he plays that he is apprehensive, lacking confidence and trying to play more aggressive chess than he can and struggling. He’s still finding it hard to make the decisions he needs to make when the chips are down. He tends to gravitate towards the safer choices and often those can be dangerous. Because if you make enough of those safe choices, your opponent’s going to take over at some point. If he has this mentality when he’s playing the match, it’s going to be hard to win games. I feel that that’s where the difficulty really lies for Ding. He is going to get chances against Gukesh. Gukesh is an extremely strong player but he doesn’t have that experience to not be giving away chances at all.”

What would then be his advice for Ding?

“If I was in his (Ding) position I would try to think that everything that has happened in the last few years…none of it matters. If he wins the World Championship, all that would be quickly forgotten. So, he has very little to lose. Just treat every game like a normal game and ask himself what would he have done five years ago?”

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