Is Rapport helping Ding win the Fide Candidates Championship?
Introduction
If you've been active in Chess media for some weeks you have probably heard about the Fide Candidates Champion. A tournament between Ding Liren (2788) and Ian Nepomniachtchi (2795). Two of the best players in Chess! The Fide Candidates tournament was previously help in Madrid, Spain where 8 players fought to be on the Candidates Championship.
When computers weren't so good at playing Chess, players brought people to help them, in this case they we're allowed to bring 3 analysts and 1 coach. Now a day computers have gotten better than humans at Chess, and so it's not so normal to see anymore 3 analysts and 1 coach. But, players always have people to help them. And this is the case of Ding, he has brought another player to help him. And that is Richard Rapport (2745).
Richard Rapport is ranked 16th on the all players ranking, and could be described as one of the most creative players ever. Rapport thinks of moves that other players don't usually think of, we've seen some moves that could have been idea of Rapport in this Championship. Rapport is a player that always thinks about openings and moves that are quite creative in some sense!
Is Rapport doing a good job?
Some people may think that maybe Rapport is doing a good job or not, but personally I think that he's helping Ding a lot! As I meantioned before Rapport does very creative moves sometimes, and this is something that Ding did in the 8th game! Let's take a look at it :
The game starts with Ding playing d4, this was clearly going to be a Nimzo-Indian Defense or a King's Indian Defense. And Nepo plays Nf6. After this move Ding plays c4, probably wanting Nepo to play e6 to play the Nimzo-Indian Defense. And of course Ding plays Nc3 and after this Nepo plays Bb4, Nimzo-Indian Defense!
After this the game develops as a normal game with the next moves :
4. e3 O-O
5. a3 Bxc3+
6. bxc3 d6
7. Ne2 c5
8. Ng3 Nc6
And in move 9 Ding plays Ra2, the commentators where suprised, and so was I seeing it at home. Why would Ding play Ra2, everyone was confused, but clearly this was an idea from Rapport. Not only where the commentators suprised but also Nepo!
But, let's stop in this move, someone who was following the game in Lichess saw that 2 players played the exact thing, and this suggested that Ding's prep was leaked. And these 2 players not only played a game, but played 72 games! If we look at this game where it's the same, white (Rapport) destroys black (Ding).
In the game white does 3 brilliant moves, with a 97.0 accuracy rate, making black resign! The internet was going crazy after seeing the possible prep of Ding. Hikaru posted a video, and so did other famous content creators!
Personally, this game between Rapport and Ding was one of the best game I've ever seen!
Conclusion
My conclusion is that Rapport is indeed helping Ding win this! If Rapport didn't help Ding, maybe he wouldn't have won some 6.5 points, but we will never know what would have happened!
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