Game Of the Week: Ding vs.Wei

Ding vs.Wei

Opening: A05: English Opening

Player(s): Ding, Wei

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With the great success of Chinese players in the last few years, many were interested to see how they would fare in the World Cup. Of course, we could predict that a head to head battle would take place at some point, as it did with Ding Liren and Wei Yi in the field of sixteen. 16-year-old Wei emerged victorious over his 22-year-old rival, but it was anything but easy. Wei triumphed in the 10 minute game tier of the playoff, but he had to win the second match game just to get there. This week's feature game will be their first match game, which went to the elder statesmen of the two. A flurry of queenless tactics led to an endgame that was difficult to evaluate, let alone play. It seems to me that the World Cup has seen a lot of games with a rook fighting against two minor pieces, and notably in some of them, quite successfully