Bouncing back from a loss was his big weakness, but not anymore.
Ian Niepómniashi achieved a triumph of enormous psychological value this Saturday by winning the fifth game of the World Cup 48 hours after losing the fourth.
Liren Ding, imprecise at several key moments, could not withstand the pressure from the Russian, who dominates the duel between them in Astana (Kazakhstan) 3-2 with two million euros in prizes.
The Chinese will have the initiative of the white pieces in the sixth this Sunday.
The day was ripe for a mental storm, because it was horrible outside: a hurricane-force wind of seven degrees below zero was sweeping the surface of a blanket of snow that sheltered the banks of the Ishim River under a misty, dark gray sky.
And to make the context even more aggressive, it turned out that the kick-off corresponded to a boxer fond of chess, the Kazakh Sérik Sapiyev, Olympic champion and two-time world champion.
Unsurprisingly, he said he loves
chess-boxing,
a sport of some success in some countries, which combines blitzkrieg with assaults in the ring.
But it was enough to look at Niepómniashi's face and attitude from the initial stages to know that chess and boxing were mixed in his mind, as David Llada, head of Communications for the International Chess Federation (FIDE), explained in a tweet after take photos of the Russian from very close: “He was walking in circles around the table like a shark, his gaze totally fixed on Ding, and not on the board.”
The anecdote was not trivial, because staying afloat after a defeat has been the weak point of the second in the world since he was a youth.
In the previous World Cup (December 2021 in Dubai), Niepómniashi drew the first five games very well with the Norwegian Magnus Carlsen, but collapsed after losing the sixth.
In the Candidates Tournament (Madrid, July 2022), he did not lose any of fourteen, but his fear of defeat bordered on pathological, judging by his face and that of his analysts when the American Fabiano Caruana squeezed him a lot, although later it was tables.
Niepomniashi and Ding cross paths on stage during the 5th game of the Astana World CupAnna Shtourman/FIDE
Although Niepómniashi had told EL PAÍS seven days earlier that he has not yet decided to work with a psychologist specialized in elite sports, it is clear that he has done something to improve his enormous fragility in that field.
The panic of another defeat would have prompted him to look for a quick draw in this game to heal wounds and buy time.
Instead, he posed the fight to win, but intelligently and without going wild: a small space advantage and better coordination of his pieces to attack the king.
Ding did not make squeaky mistakes, as in the first two rounds, but he did make a series of inaccuracies, used by his rival to press harder and harder, until he collapsed after four and a quarter hours of combat.
The best version of the Russian, despite the painful stumble on Thursday, clearly defeated a very poor Ding compared to his display of power two days earlier.
To underline the remarkable psychological importance of his victory and his desire for revenge, Niepómniashi mixed humor with a few drops of cruelty in the press conference: "Yesterday [for Friday, a day of rest] I missed Ding," he said with half smile.
Meanwhile, it was no longer snowing outside, the wind had calmed down and there were some rays of sunshine as timid as Ding, who, once again, was very sincere: "This defeat hurts me more than the one in the second game."
That day, the Asian acknowledged that he was "depressed", but then he recovered as if he had been injected with a liter of intense coffee.
He now he faces another trial by fire.
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