Nova Daily - 21 March 2025

Hi!

The only thing you can possibly hope for is a fair shot.

- Nova Stone, 19 March 2025

The importance of luck in success can hardly be overstated, and I've mentioned before that the only thing that you can do is to reduce the amount of mistakes that you make to a minimum.

One former world champion of chess owes an awful lot to luck. For the Candidates tournament of 2022, Ding Liren hadn't qualified and wouldn't participate. But because the war in Ukraine broke out and Sergey Karjakin was in support of this war, he was excluded from the tournament. His spot was taken by the highest rated non-qualified player, which was Ding Liren.

With another stroke of luck, Ding finished second place in the Candidates by beating and thus overtaking Nakamura as runner-up. Normally this wouldn't make him eligible to play for the World Championship, but because Carlsen had stepped aside, this second place granted him the right to play for the highest honour in chess.

The world championship match was a true roller-coaster of emotions that I see no need to repeat here. The final rapid game of the match was a mess, and Ding won.

His reign as world champion ended with a stroke of luck for his opponent when Ding made an elementary blunder in his final game with Gukesh Dommaraju. It's fresh enough in our memories.

These bits of contemporary chess history went through my head as my otherwise drawn endgame suddenly ended with my opponent making a level-1 mistake in an endgame that he was doing a great job holding.

I'll enter my thoughts tomorrow.