Chess Analysis Spotlight: Ding Vs. Duda

2018 Chess Olympiad, bringing the trophy back home

Today we focus on Round 10.1 of the 43rd Olympiad which took place in Batumi Georgia, in 2018.  Liren Ding’s win over Jan Krzysztof Duda helped the Chinese team to secure the 1st place and to bring the trophy back home after a year’s absence (US team won the 2017 Olympiad). Selected #5 on chess.com’s list of top 2018 games, this game features beautiful moments that we wanted to share with you. The game’s PGN can be found here. 

There are many notable moves by Ding that are worth analyzing and learning from. We decided to focus on four of them, and we invite you to analyze more by pasting the game’s PGN into the Import box.

27.e7

Move 27.e7 from Ding-Duda, 2018 Batumi Chess Olympiad

As for the checkmate threat, 27. e7 .. 28. Ng5 and Black cannot play 28… Qg6? because 29. exf8=Q# captures the rook

28.Ng5

In this position, instead of showing you the explanation of the next best move, we focused on the Idea-Problem-Solution framework that DecodeChess generates in some cases. It really helps to understand this beautiful move!

Move 28.Ng5 from Ding-Duda, 2018 Batumi Chess Olympiad

34.Qxf4

In this position, while White already had a decisive advantage (12.45) it had to counter the threat of Qf5.

Move 34.Qxf4 from Ding-Duda, 2018 Batumi Chess Olympiad

35.Nf7+

In this image, we expanded the annotated variation that’s available for the first explanation (prevents playing Bxe8). Notice the yellow + signs which all indicate that you can expand the explanation to follow an annotated variation on the board.

Move 35.Nf7+ from Ding-Duda, 2018 Batumi Chess Olympiad

We hope you enjoyed this chess analysis spotlight od Ding vs Duda, make sure to visit our blog for more instructive content.

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