One of the oddest sports stories of the year is quietly brewing in the world of chess
So chess has kind of a unique structure for its World Championship.
Every other year, a Candidates Tournament is held early in the year; this is an eight-player round-robin tournament that players qualify for by winning in other major events or simply by having a very high rating.
The winner of this tournament then plays the current world champion at the end of the year. Essentially, being world champion of chess operates on Klingon rules: you have to beat the previous guy to do it.
Historically, this has allowed certain very strong players to have extremely long-lived runs as world champions. Most recently: Magnus Carlsen won the 2013 World Championship and defended his title repeatedly until 2023. His run ended not because he lost, but because he essentially got bored of the world championship format and wanted to take a break from classical1 chess.
When Carlsen withdrew from the 2023 championship, the top two candidates – Ian Nepomniachtchi and Ding Liren – played for it. Ding Liren thus became the current world champion.
This is already a near-unprecedented turn of events; the only previous world champion to simply decline to defend his title was Bobby Fischer, in 1975. But what became of the subsequent 2024 title is even stranger.
Here's the core of this story: Ding Liren is the current world champion of chess. He has not won a rated game of classical chess since January. His rating has dropped precipitously as a result. As I write this, his live rating2 is 2727, which would make him #21 in the world. So, very soon, there may be 20 people on the planet with higher FIDE ratings than the world champion of chess.
This is a pretty insane turn of events. Chess players do tend to decline over time, after a certain age, but rarely does this happen so rapidly, and it's not clear that this is what is going on. In general, it's not clear at all what's going on – there's no official or public word on what Ding might be going through, or really much of an explanation at all for how he's been playing all year.
The FIDE Chess Olympiad is currently ongoing; as you might guess from the name, it's a team tournament where national teams compete. Ding Liren is part of the Chinese team, as you might expect. On Monday, Ding lost with the white pieces to Vietnamese grandmaster Liem Le. After this result, he hasn't been seen since.
Substitutions are common in team chess events, but it's notable that Ding didn't play against his counterpart on the Indian team, Gukesh D. Gukesh, an 18-year-old grandmaster, is the winner of the last Candidates Tournament, and therefore Ding's opponent in the world championship match set to take place in November. This was their last scheduled game before then.
Gukesh, for his part, has been on an absolute tear in the Olympiad. His live rating has climbed to 2784, making him #5 in the world at the moment.
At present, chess is headed for a world where the challenger outrates the incumbent world champion by 50 points, and neither player is top #3 in the world.
Photo source: Michal Walusza/FIDE
'Classical' chess is a general term for chess played with long time controls – typically, players get between one hour and 90 minutes on the clock at the start of the match; they may get more with each move, or after playing a certain number of moves. It is the most prestigious format of chess, which is central to the world championship and the FIDE rating system.↩
As the FIDE Chess Olympiad hasn't yet concluded (as I write this), official ratings haven't been updated; this is a calculation done with the game results that are already available.↩