How great is Ding Liren?

i am impressed wee

I have a hard time being impressed by individual tournament results. They all get rolled into rating anyway. I see Karpov and Ding have similar rating gaps to the dominant players of their times, in your examples.

But when you suggest ranking Ding ahead of Karpov, and write about Ding winning games to a higher degree than Karpov did, one can't post every event Karpov played... At the bottom of this post is a tournament table from an earlier event, Las Palmas 1977, when Karpov held the title. It's not like he didn't know how to win games.

I think that if Ding when just winning the title would be ranked as greater than Karpov, that would imply that he maybe already would be the greatest player ever at that stage of his career. I don't think anyone else would be ranked as having a greater career than Karpov when winning the title. Ding as #5 today would imply quite a bit higher in a few years. When for example Carlsen won the title he was mentioned as around #10 among the greatest ever, and then he had won 17 and finished second in 6 of the last 25 super tournaments.

Karpov was number one for a decade, and number 2 for another decade. Does Ding come even close to this? No. Nobody of the current bunch can be measured to Karpov, except Carlsen. Kaprov is one of the best players ever.

Everyone can win games against sufficiently poor opposition, sure. That doesn't change the fact that Karpov excelled not in brilliant attacks, as Fischer and to a lesser extent Tal did, but in accurate defenses.

I interpret your original post as a request for comparison between Ding's lifetime career, which isn't yet complete, with the other players' lifetime careers. Obviously it's irrelevant to compare some peoples' lifetime careers to other peoples' halves of lifetime careers.

”I interpret your original post as a request for comparison between Ding's lifetime career, which isn't yet complete, with the other players' lifetime careers. Obviously it's irrelevant to compare some peoples' lifetime careers to other peoples' halves of lifetime careers”

Yes, I’m just surprised that you suggest ranking Ding’s current lifetime career achievements ahead of Karpov’s. Ding is a great player, but his two international tournament victories, that are listed by IronSteam1 above, are Moscow Grand Prix 2017, where his three wins came against Hou Yifan, Gelfand and Inarkiev, and Sinquefield Cup 2019, where he scored two wins in classical and then won a speed chess playoff against Carlsen. Obviously two great results, but Karpov had a few as well, and that over decades after becoming World Champion…

Reread my post. I said nothing about "current" lifetime career.

Ah, then I take it you include future anticipated results when comparing Ding with Karpov. Still not easy to get into the top five among the greatest ever.

I can't believe Nimzowitsch is #50 on that list. He wrote the Granddaddy of all chess books, the book that is basically the basis of all subsequent chess books.

Not easy, sure. But Karpov doesn't belong there; it's easy to conclude Ding will be comparable to him or better.

”Karpov doesn't belong there; it's easy to conclude Ding will be comparable to him or better”

Easy for you but much harder for many others :-)

Karpov was by far the most dominant player in the world for 1975-85. He won almost every tournament he entered, often by a wide margin, and absolutely dominated all the top player

@Lakersnephew

Karpov was by far the most dominant player in the world for 1975-85. He won almost every tournament he entered, often by a wide margin, and absolutely dominated all the top player.

With one exception of course...Bobby Fischer.

To be fair, Fischer didn't play much during that period. But that just says it's easy to be dominant in a desert.

Hmm, I don't think this explanation holds water. You have a situation where there's an outlier -- one player performing vastly better than everyone else for a decade. You could read that two ways: (1) One player was much better than usual; or (2) A bunch of players were much worse than usual. Statistically, it makes a lot more sense that there would be one outlier rather than a whole lot. You really think that, if there's a choice between assuming one player was uncharacteristically strong, and that the next fifteen players in the world were uncharacteristically weak, the second is the likelier explanation?

I don't even much like Karpov as a player (and still less as a member of the Duma). But the facts speak for themselves.

Maybe, like me, you don't care for his style? That's a totally legit preferance. If that's all you mean, then say it that way, and nobody will gripe. And if you want to make a case for placing Capablanca ahead of him, or even Tal on the theory that he offered someting special in a way one else quite did, I don't think people would call that a crazy choice, even if they don't quite agree. But whether you want to call him fifth or eigth, he belongs in a very lofty place in chess history, and Ding has a lot of work to do to get to that point. (I'll be rooting for him.)

That exchange was not about Karpov as much as it was about Fischer. For how much of that period was Fischer a, or the, top player, ahead of, perhaps far ahead of, Karpov? We don't know.

Having lived through the period, I don't have to worry about the statistical arguments, because I'm not making statistical guesses.

For decades prior, all the top players came out of the Soviet system. This happened for a reason: the Soviets invested lots of resources into developing Soviet chess players, because they saw it as a way of demonstrating the superiority of the Soviet system over the West.

Then a wild card, Fischer, came out of the blue and systematically demolished the Soviet chess superstructure. Soviet player after Soviet player retired. The Soviet system was not superior; in fact, it looked like it might be inferior. It certainly wasn't worth such a large investment of resources any more. As a result, the Soviets ceased to produce a steady stream of new great players.

The resulting desert meant that, when Fischer left the scene, the best the Soviets and the FIDE could come up with to challenge Karpov was the aging Korchnoi, nearly 50 years old when he faced Karpov for the world championship. That isn't a sign of a healthy pool of strong players. It would be as if today's player pool were missing everyone who could beat Anand today. If we removed Nepo, Firouzja, Nakamura, Giri, Caruana, So, and a few more top players from today's pool, I don't think it would be unreasonable to characterize the remaining top player pool as a "desert". The opposition Karpov faced was even weaker, as Anand was at least strong enough to win a world championship when he was younger, which Korchnoi wasn't.

This has nothing to do with personal preference. I liked Karpov's playing style, and in particular, I would have liked to have seen a Fischer-Karpov match, because I think Karpov's style was particularly well suited to foiling Fischer's style of attacks. But, we didn't get to see that. And it's just a fact that the field Fischer left behind when he retired early - the field Karpov dominated - was a weak field.

^ An eloquently written, and thought-provoking viewpoint of Fischer's place in chess history ...

That's all rather elqouent . . . but what does it mean? It feels like a description of how we want to picture how things happen, than a description that makes sense of what was going on.

What does it mean to say that Fischer "systematically demolished the Soviet chess superstructure." (And do you mean "infrastructure"?) Fischer obviously had no direct hand in anything the Soviets did. So you must mean indirectly (rather than "systematically"). But what exactly was the indirect effect he had? Is the idea that everyone in the Soviet Union said, "Oh well, the West is better than us at chess after all. We'd better give up." ?? I don't konw the ins and outs of funding or things like that, but that's not my impression. My impression is they doubled down trying to win back the title. Is there evidence that they cut funding to chess after 1972 (other than cancelling Taimanov's pension)? If there is, I'd be interested to see it. And even if that's true, I'm not sure it really does what you want it to do -- Karpov would have shared in that reduced funding on the way up and clearly vastly outperformed anyone else who was in the same situation (not to mention all the Western players who didn't have that disadvantage).

I get this at a level of feeling -- we have a certain nostalgic attachment to that first postwar generation of top-ten players like Keres, Geller, Bronstein, and the likes. They were the heroes of the moment when chess really came into its own as a professional pursuit (the first generation of grandmasters). But it strikes me as unlikely that the #2-10 players of the 70s and 80s all of a sudden got objectively worse.

Karpov's opposition was the best players in the world for 3 whole decades. Calling the opposition weak is like calling everyone weak, except Kasparov, during 72-2000.

Fischer was exceptionally strong, probably stronger than Karpov, but it's not Karpov's fault that Fischer didn't want to continue playing Chess. Karpov was an exceptional player on his own right. Seeing them play would had been interesting as they had a very similar style, always preferring technical solutions to complications or speculative attacks.

In any case, is Ding a Karpov? Who knows, they're both amazing dynamic positional players tough!

No, I mean superstructure, as I wrote. And it was very direct. Fischer beat Soviet player after Soviet player, former world champions, their expected future world champions, and at the end their current world champion. And remember, Fischer's beating them consisted of "crush[ing] the opponent's mind" and "break[ing] a man's ego".

From the viewpoint of the up and coming Soviet players, like Kasparov, there was indeed the thought that "the West" - or at least Fischer - "is better than us at chess after all." Obviously Kasparov did not "give up", but he seems to have lost the previous degree of trust in the Soviet system - and indeed his subsequent politics suggests respect for the West over the Soviets in ways that ultimately went far beyond Chess.

But no, Karpov did not share in any reduced funding on the way up because he had already finished being on his way up by the time of Fischer's peak. Karpov is basically the last product of the Soviet system. He might have shared in reduced funding once he was at the top, and that may have made him a worse player than he would have been had the Soviet system continued. Subsequent top Russian players, like Kasparov and Kramnik, may have benefited from coaches that had come up through the Soviet system, but they didn't benefit from the system itself.

If you want to ignore the facts and stick to your nostalgic attachment to Karpov, that's of course your prerogative. There's no real reason to place Karpov above Spassky at #15 or so, though.