Mat is not enough here – Kommersant

Ian Nepomniachtchi retained his lead in the World Chess Championship match in Astana, drawing in the eighth game with black against Ding Liren. True, the Russian grandmaster achieved this draw virtually by a miracle – thanks to a whole series of mistakes by his Chinese opponent.

The game that opened the second half of the championship match added another – already the sixth in a row – played opening and another puzzling plot. This time, Ian Nepomniachtchi tested Ding Liren with the Nimzowitsch Defence, which sometimes causes jitters in chess beginners: after all, the pinning of the knight that came to c3 with the bishop looks rather unpleasant. But the Chinese, of course, were not embarrassed by the choice, and for some time the game went along the lines of a well-studied and boring theory.

The boredom ended already on the ninth move, when Ding Liren suddenly moved the rook from a1 to a2. It was a novelty, and seemingly so meaningless that Ian Nepomniachtchi seemed to be very surprised by such an invention, which obviously belonged to the Chinese second Richard Rapport: the Hungarian grandmaster, who recently represented Romania, loves extraordinary solutions, even if computer analysis does not see any good.

And then everything went round and round. It turned out that Ding Liren had a dangerous attack on the kingside. And he threw a whole bishop into its furnace, exposing it to the attack of the pawn on g5.

It smelled of some kind of romantic chess – not even from the past, but from the century before last, from the time of the great Paul Morphy, when the wizards of the game still knew how to ignore the victims.

True, there were no victims, strictly speaking, in fact. Ding Liren attacked the horse of Yang Nepomniachtchi, and he, of course, noticed that saving him was more expensive for himself, a checkmate would fly in. So the black horse also died the death of the brave, but the h-vertical still remained the vertical on which constant threats to Nepomniachtchi loomed. Moreover, the Russian, to the dismay of almost everyone who commented on the game, did not find a rook move to h8 that corrected the situation. And with Ding Liren, who had already taught that, having received a slap in the face from Nepomniachtchi, he must shake himself and win back, everything grew together as it should.

Little was required of him – a simple transfer of the rook from d2 to d3, in order to then introduce it to that very file. And it was the same rook that strangely descended at the beginning, that is, apparently, a piece special for the Chinese … Ding Liren instead moved the passed d-pawn he had formed from the sixth to the seventh rank, closer to the promotion square, as if he was hypnotized by her such good position and could no longer think of anything else but a new queen.

And Ian Nepomniachtchi, in response, again falsified and again made his position practically hopeless. Ot moved his queen from the eighth rank to get closer to the enemy king, but at the same time left a rook blocking a passed pawn under the attack of Ding Liren’s queen. It is clear that the Chinese was afraid of a perpetual check from his opponent. But in order to calculate that there will be no perpetual check, that in half a dozen moves the white king will hide from the cannonade, it was not necessary to be a supercomputer or, say, Garry Kasparov (recognized as a foreign agent) in his heyday.

In general, the rook had to be taken, winning the game, and Ding Liren spared it.

It all ended with a beautiful horse sacrifice from Jan Nepomniachtchi. He lost a piece, but in return received three extra pawns, the full equivalent of the given away. And most importantly, a position in which it was already impossible for Ding Liren to find a win. So after the eighth installment out of 14 stipulated by the regulations, the Russian retained an advantage of one point.

Alexey Dospekhov