Ian Nepomniachtchi opened the scoring for champion victories

Russian grandmaster Ian Nepomniachtchi took a very important step towards victory in the World Chess Championship match against Ding Liren in Astana at its very start. In the second game, he defeated his opponent with black pieces.

This was the 13th game played by Ian Nepomniachtchi in major chess matches. The previous eleven took place as part of the first championship in his life. duel – at the end of 2021 in Dubai against the Norwegian Magnus Carlsen. In it, Nepomniachtchi never managed to defeat Carlsen, who confidently defended the title, having abandoned it last summer due to a “lack of motivation”. The Russian did not manage to cope with the new opponent in the opening game of his second championship match, although it rather confirmed the assumptions that Ian Nepomniachtchi was the favorite in the confrontation with Ding Liren: with White, he crushed the Chinese, but failed to turn the minimum advantage into a win. .

The breakthrough happened the very next day. The opponents played the Queen’s Gambit, in which already on the fourth move Ding Liren used something like a novelty, at least for elite-level competitions. We are talking about the move h3. And this strange, sharply out of the habitual pattern of a well-studied opening, the pawn move was probably the fruit of the thoughts of the second of the Chinese Richard Rapport: the Hungarian grandmaster, who has recently represented Romania, is a fan of precisely such non-standard, “crooked” positions, sometimes knocking down his opponents confused.

However, the move did not make any impression on Ian Nepomniachtchi. It soon became clear that he already had the advantage, and Ding Liren’s position was getting worse and worse with each move. The kingside is falling apart, the pawn is tearing vertically to the queens… In the end, the completely outplayed Chinese had no choice but to surrender.

Thus, Ian Nepomniachtchi has taken an important step towards success in the match, which, however, will have many more classical control games. The regulation provides for fourteen of them.

Alexey Dospekhov