Book Review: Ding Liren's Best Games by GM Davorin Kuljasevic
Book Review: Ding Liren's Best Games by GM Davorin Kuljasevic
A wonderful biography and collection of one of the greats
Ding Liren’s Best Games occupies a unique landscape in the world of chess literature, as far as I am aware. I don’t think I have found another book that boasts a collection of his greatest games. So, in a certain sense, this book is probably the first of its kind.
I’ve read one other work by Davorin Kuljasevic and while I found it to be a good read, I don’t think I was the target audience for How To Study Chess On Your Own at the time I read it. I’m still 200 Elo below the level he thinks that book was written for. As it turns out, Ding Liren’s Best Games is probably more my speed.
About our hero
Ding Liren tends to be a self-effacing character, preferring to let his chess do his talking, and so every single word he speaks gives us a lot of insights into the man himself. As such, it’s a genuine treat to see Ding in his very own words annotating 11 of his own games contained in the book.
There are a lot of fragments at the beginning of the book, where Kuljasevic uses illustrative examples to explain what he thinks are Ding’s primary attributes as a player. It is borderline exhausting to set up all of these positions from scratch, but Kuljasevic insists on explaining exactly why he thinks Ding has such qualities.
Kuljasevic lists six “core” qualities when trying to describe Ding’s profile as a player:
Attack, initiative, and dynamic play
Risk-taking material sacrifices
Sharp tactics and calculation
Exploiting weaknesses
Bishop pair
Active play with the King.
Later he believes that as Ding matured, he put on these four qualities on top of his core six:
Endgame technique
Psychological resilience
Patient positional play
Handling imbalanced positions
By the time you’ve started Ding’s story from when he was a junior chess player, you already feel like you’ve known his style for a long time, because of all the examples that Kuljasevic puts up to make his point!
Biography and Game Collection
The book seems very well-researched, and I think Kuljasevic’s efforts are to be commended for the amount of love and care he put into researching one of his very own chess heroes. You learn a bit about Ding’s academic pursuits and family life as you see him evolve into the titan that would become the 17th official world chess champion. Compared to people like Carlsen, Fischer, and Kasparov, Ding seems human and relatable. He is a hard person to dislike.
After his profile has been shaped, we get to start with Ding as a young player, with the early examples giving us a look at the kind of player he naturally is, but as time goes on, we see Ding transform into a professional chess player full-time, breaking into the 2700s, then the top 10, then the 2800s, before we get a look at a few games from the 2022 Candidates Tournament and then finally the match with Nepomniachtchi.
The book features 41 full games, most of which are deeply annotated and analyzed either by Kuljasevic or by Ding. Kuljasevic has a relatively variation-light style, preferring heavy prose, but sometimes he goes deeply into one particular line to show an idea, and this can happen multiple times in any given game. While obviously the lines are computer-checked, it seems like he chooses the most clear variations that don’t require too many branches in variations. He also doesn’t hesitate to cite an engine’s variation when necessary. In general, his style is clear, but detailed. Because of the analysis style of this book, I would say that the 1400+-rating range is about where the analysis becomes particularly helpful. But obviously anybody can read this book and play through the games and simply enjoy them.
Some of my favorite games were Ding-Yangyi (Game 36), where Ding played a fantastic Reti-KIA and allowed his bishop pair to shine:
And this KID against future-second Richard Rapport (Game 31):
And lastly, the famous and deep (not to mention beautiful) pawn move from Game 6 of the 2023 WCC against Nepomniachtchi:
These and many more of Ding’s triumphs are covered in painstaking detail through the course of the book.
The book does conclude with a short chapter featuring 18 positions from Ding’s games presented as puzzles, but by the time you’ve reached this point in the book, it feels almost like lip-service, because of how incredible the story leading up to King Ding’s championship win was. It’s basically an anti-climax. In my opinion, you can skip this chapter guilt-free — we can leave the tactics puzzles for the tactics books! But if you insist on maximizing your learning potential from this book, you won’t leave disappointed.
Ding and Alekhine (!?)
What I found as I studied Ding’s games over the course of a month and a half, putting in about 20 hours combined of reading + poring over each game on a Lichess analysis board, actually surprised me a bit. Ding’s games and analysis remind me, in a lot of ways (and of all people), of Alekhine. Reading Alekhine’s notes and Ding’s, their similarities become more obvious: a penchant for the initiative, always searching for the attack, Queen’s Pawn players who study their opening theory enthusiastically, and an exact, calculating precision.
People think of Ding as a solid positional player, and by all accounts he truly is. Yet he is also a fierce attacking player, with both colors. Kuljasevic gives us a “flashcard” in the second chapter where he chronicles Ding’s opening repertoire through the years. Ding began with the King’s Indian Defense, then widened his portfolio with the Semi-Slav, followed by the Nimzo-Indian, and finally adding the Queen’s Gambit Declined to his mix.
You can see that his attacking instincts never left him, but his solidity increased with his ELO as he adapted to top-tier masters. He still attacks — just from an increasingly sound positional basis. Ding’s games in 1.d4, therefore, are instructive with either the white or black pieces, and this sweetens the pot if you also partake in any of the same repertoire he does. Even if like me you’re not a Queen’s Pawn opening player, there are lots of instructive examples that will probably make you conclude that you too should play a little bit more like Ding! It’s hard not to be inspired by a player of his caliber.
An unlikely champion?
Ever since the championship, I have thought of Ding as the most unlikely of recent world champions — not because he doesn’t deserve it or because he was simply lucky to win, but because of all the hoops he had to go through with the Chinese government’s travel restrictions due to COVID, Karjakin’s temporary ban from FIDE and FIDE’s requirements to earn the highest rating spot to replace him; the number of games Ding needed to maintain his 2800+ rating during that time period; Carlsen abdicating the title, and Ding’s clinching of a second-place finish at the Candidates tournament in order to be Nepomniachtchi’s challenger for the title, and finding a second in Richard Rapport, sparking one of the most beloved and odd sidekick stories in recent chess memory. So many coincidences just so happened to work in his favor, but in the end, he proved that he deserved the title by defeating Nepo in the rapid tiebreaks, self-pinning for immortality, as his predecessor tweeted in congratulations. The book portrays this drama well, and the chapter serves as a satisfying finish for our protagonist.
The last of Ding Liren’s best games?
The strange thing about this book is how much of a future career in chess is left for Ding to potentially discover, such that there are many possible “best games” ahead that would be deserving of their own entries into a book like this. Already, the naysayers have compared his and Gukesh D’s recent results and some have already practically declared that Gukesh is the next champion. While this would be an incredible historical feat should it come to pass, the games in this book remind that rumors of Ding’s demise have been rather exaggerated. He’s still one of the greatest players in the world, and of all time. While he has always somewhat been eclipsed by Magnus’s shadow, he’s still deserving of a game collection — or more. I hope that more authors and publishers take note and give us more Ding, because there’s so much we could benefit from! Besides that, I predict many good games in the future. Or at least, I hope it happens. Could be that Ding retires for good some time in the near future, but having achieved the world champion title, I wouldn’t blame him for stopping to smell the roses permanently.
Conclusion
Overall, I was really impressed with the selection of games, Kuljasevic’s and (especially) Ding’s deep yet clear analytical style, and the amount of off-the-board information the reader is made privy to — it was nice to get a taste for chess in the eyes of the Chinese, as well as to learn more about the introverted man whose disarmingly honest answers during a troubled world championship cycle won hearts around the world. Every game in this book deserves to be there, just as Ding deserves to be in the hall of world champions alongside Carlsen and his future contemporaries.
Have I any complaints, it would be that this book could have used more full games, even if they weren’t as deeply annotated and explained as the core 41 games were. I understand the constraints of the project, and am glad that Kuljasevic went for quality over quantity — but I still wish there were a bit more, especially since it seems Ding’s games are criminally under-represented in the game collections department. I also wish that Kuljasevic had included more games where Ding played the English Opening. However, all these minor complaints are simply a sign that this book is a hopeful first step to righting the wrong of not giving every chess book reader more chances to study the games of one of the word’s most intriguing and likeable grandmasters.