A few hours before Hikaru Nakamura walked into the confessional booth at Norway Chess during his round 5 match against Ding Liren to speak about how his opponent, the world champion from China, “just doesn’t look right”, Dr Mehmet Ismail has crunched data that might cause some concerns to Ding fans.
Dr Ismail is a Ph.D in Economics from Maastricht University and a lecturer at King’s College London. For the elite Norway Chess event currently underway in Stavanger, he has been running the Game Theory Corner, where he looks at multiple factors to come up with the probability of each player winning the event after each successive round.
But with Ding looking vulnerable after winning the crown by beating Ian Nepomniachtchi last year (and looking shaky, literally, as per Nakamura at Norway Chess), Dr Ismail also waded into the numerical jungle for the upcoming Gukesh vs Ding battle, which is to happen later this year, trying to figure out who has a better shot at wearing the crown at the end of the year.
“For the World Championship game, I calculated the win prediction for Gukesh versus Ding. The overall chance of Gukesh winning the title, all things considered, is 63.4 percent. Whereas Ding has a 36.6 percent chance of winning the title overall. But if we want to only calculate for someone winning the world championship without the contest heading into the tiebreaks, then Gukesh has a 56.7 percent probability of winning the World Championship battle outright (without the game heading into tiebreaks). He’s the favourite, actually. Ding has a 29.9 percent probability of retaining the title (in the 14-game classical slugfest). But there’s a 13.4 percent chance that the battle heads into the tiebreak. That’s not a negligible percentage.
“And if it heads into tiebreaks, Ding is the favourite. Because, yes, Gukesh is improving very fast — and we cannot know how much more he will improve by the time the World Championship comes along — but Ding is very good in both rapid and blitz formats. Ding has a 65 percent chance of staying the World Champion if the contest heads into the tiebreaks,” Dr Ismail told The Indian Express on Saturday before Ding lost to Nakamura.
To calculate the predictions, he used multiple factors such as current ELO ratings and performance ratings for the past one year (this is the aspect that tips the scales in Gukesh’s favour).
Ding has looked vulnerable ever since becoming world champion, with woeful results at the Tata Steel Masters in Wijk aan Zee and the Freestyle Chess G.O.A.T. Challenge.
He revealed a bit of his mindset heading into the Norway Chess tournament by telling The Indian Express that his goal was “not to finish last”.
“Maybe I became weaker in chess (after becoming world champion). Not as strong as before, maybe two years ago,” Ding had told The Indian Express. “This year also my performances did not go well. I spent more time resting rather than playing chess (in recent months). Everytime I play a tournament, I lost ratings, be it classical or rapid tournaments. I played a tournament in China and I finished in last place among six players. So it’s not been very easy.”
Nakamura raised concerns about Ding’s issues on the way to defeating the world champion on Saturday.
“I don’t know what’s going through Ding’s head… it is very clear that he’s not the same person he was back when I played him in 2022. Everything, including the body language, doesn’t feel right. I would be very concerned for him for this upcoming World Championship match against Gukesh. He just doesn’t look right. You still feel bad for the guy… Not sure if it was visible on the video but at some point I was struggling to keep my composure because at some moment he started bouncing up and down, he was shaking, like literally shaking,” said Nakamura.
After breaking down the numbers, Dr Ismail says that if Ding cannot recover from whatever it is that is affecting his chess, he could resort to a strategy of pushing the battle into the tiebreaks.
“If Ding feels confident again and recovers, he would try to win. Ding is Ding. He had gone on a 100-game unbeaten streak (back in 2018). If he feels that he is not up for it, he’ll grind out draws (in the 14 classical games),” says Dr Ismail.
The economist is full of praise for Gukesh’s game play at the recent Candidates where he emerged victorious from a field of eight players, including veterans like Ian Nepomniachtchi, Nakamura and Fabiano Caruana.
“If you look at the Candidates and look at who played the best chess on average, both Nepomniachtchi and Nakamura played better according to the chess engine. But then you look at the game intelligence numbers — which measures the ability of players to take strategic risks by deviating from the main line — then Gukesh had the highest median game intelligence score over all players.
“This basically shows that Gukesh played less accurately (using the engine as a yardstick). Interestingly, in terms of the engine, Alireza Firouzja and Gukesh played almost the same if you look at what the engine says (was the best move) on average. But Gukesh had a higher game intelligence score. The mistakes he made induced even more mistakes from others,” explains Dr Ismail.
