[KaoruAoiShiho]

A lot of people (me included) thought this series was dire for Ding after watching him get crushed a few days ago by his opponent Nepo where Ding visibly froze and was in a state of total mental disarray after he couldn't decide on his move, wasted a ton of time, and ended up making a bad move anyways.

Commenters said that this was Nepo's strength, even if he doesn't make the absolute greatest move he makes a good enough move relatively quickly compared to his competition and we saw the advantage of that play out.

But ironically that game being successful for Nepo's fast style might've cost him the championship in the end as he tried to replicate the time pressure on Ding every game after to pretty poor results. He might've done better if he didn't get such a dramatic victory that game.

[vikingerik]

The "Ding froze" assessment from game 7 was the fake-news media meme but wasn't the reality. He explained it after the fact. He knew what he was doing. He thought his position was lost, so he was calculating everything to look for a line to save a draw with perpetual checks / threefold repetition. He felt he had nothing to lose by expending all his time searching for that since he was going to lose anyway if he didn't find it. He was incorrect in evaluating his position as worse than it was (remember the players don't get the computer analysis numbers), but he wasn't incorrect in his time management stemming from that evaluation.

The same went for Nepo's supposed "tilt" in the last WCC match against Carlsen, that was media exaggeration. He lost one game with one mistake, so then had to push into risky positions after that in hopes of catching up, since he had nothing more to lose in match terms. The big discrepancy in score for that match wasn't domination, it was an artifact of the meta-factor of playing for high variance.

[Bootvis]

c5 in game 9 by Nepo of the match against Carlsen was not a high variance play but just playing way below his level. All the commentators spotted it instantly.

[hyperbovine]

You're not kidding. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7REwQ4dSOk

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

It's pretty much just an obvious blunder. And with 49 minutes on his clock.

[vikingerik]

That was the mistake I was talking about - but yeah I misremembered the sequence of events. Nepo was already down by a game then, the very long game 6. After game 9 he was pushing for high variance.

[specproc]

I dunno about variance in Nepo-Carlsen. Game six was brutal, a cat playing with its food. I think it's fair to say Carlsen outclasses Nepo.

[vikingerik]

Carlsen outclasses Nepo, yes. By a degree that is one or two mistakes across twelve full length games. Not to the degree of "tilt" or "meltdown" that the media coverage was trying to push.

[Andrew_nenakhov]

It was an incredibly long and incredibly precise game from both sides played by opponents of virtually equal skill.

[rhaway84773]

I can’t find any video of Ding saying that but I’ll assume it’s true.

Well, then Ding is lying to himself (which would actually be a clever strategy so that doesn’t weigh on your mind the next time you’re in a tough time situation). Ding started his move with over 5 minutes to go. He finally played a move with about 45 secs remaining. He still had 8 moves to make in 45 seconds before time would be extended.

The 5 or so seconds he was leaving himself for each move was close to being physically impossible to achieve. Ding absolutely froze.

Also, it wasn’t “Fake news media” claiming he froze. It was live commentators who are largely GMs themselves who recognized it as him freezing. Anish Giri predicted he froze live when there was about 4 mins to go, from the fact that he hadn’t made a move yet.

[vikingerik]

The live commentators were doing the same thing as the media coverage - jumping to the immediate shallow sound-bite conclusion, without thinking about any deeper explanation or context.

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

This is a good point. Ding's time management has actually been excellent in this match besides that one moment where he froze. But that was literally one move. In most of the games he's just close to serious time pressure, but never gets there. He's just very fastidious about actually spending all his time.

Ian definitely slowed down in the latter half of the match as well, but he still played too quickly in key positions.

[jackmott42]

Think of the chess players as facing a gigantic search problem. They don't have time to search everything, so they have to use intuition to decide what lines to calculate. Their intuition is very good but not perfect. So sometimes you get in a situation where you have computed the wrong lines and see no solution. The solution might be obvious on another day where you randomly don't cull the right lines, and very hard to find on a day when you are culling the good lines.

Ding when he froze was for whatever reason missing the good move, so felt he was lost, searching and searching for some solution. It seems crazy only because the engine is there telling us it is drawn. But the human is culling the lines that work for some misguided reason.

[lubujackson]

In that vein, when the cheating scandal happened a few months back Hikaru (a top 10 player) said the only information he would need to make a difference in a match is getting a buzz when the position is critical. Not which move to make, but when to spend time analyzing deeply.

It is hard to over-emphasize how much high level chess is about time management.