Ding's Rolling Pawn

By 2019 Ding Liren was already a fixture at the very top of the rating list, and this win over world number two Fabiano Caruana in round nine of the Sinquefield Cup showed why. From a Queen's Gambit Declined, Ding built a knight outpost and slowly restricted Caruana's pieces, in a manner that observers at the time compared to the AlphaZero games which had made headlines two years earlier.

The position turned decisively after 39.Nxf7, when Ding's knight infiltrated Caruana's camp and, combined with a rolling e pawn, proved impossible to contain. Caruana resigned on move 57 as the pawn reached e7 with nothing left able to stop it queening.

It was one of several strong results that made Ding, at the time, arguably the form player in the world outside the very top two or three names. Four years later he beat Ian Nepomniachtchi to become the seventeenth World Chess Champion, and games like this one are usually pointed to as early evidence of the class that made that run possible.