World Chess Championship 2023
The first championship without Carlsen — Ding Liren defeats Nepomniachtchi in tiebreaks at Astana to become China's first male world chess champion.
- Year
- 2023
- Format
- Best of 14 classical games + rapid tiebreaks
- Venue
- St. Regis Astana
- Prize fund
- $2,000,000
- Cycle
- unified
After Magnus Carlsen declined to defend the title against the 2022 Candidates winner, FIDE rule promoted the second-place finisher (Ding Liren) to face the winner (Ian Nepomniachtchi) in the 2023 championship. It was the first championship match without the reigning champion participating — and the first to crown a new world champion since 2013.
The Match
Held at the St. Regis Astana in Kazakhstan from 9 to 30 April 2023. The fourteen classical games produced three wins for each side and ended 7–7 — among the most volatile championship matches of the modern era, with several games featuring positions where engines and grandmaster commentators disagreed sharply about the evaluations. The four-game rapid tiebreak at 25+10 was 1.5–1.5 going into Game 4, where Ding won as White after Nepomniachtchi blundered on move 47.
The Seventeenth Champion
Final aggregate 9.5–8.5. Ding became the seventeenth world chess champion and the first from China. His subsequent reign was difficult — he played little chess in 2023 and lost the title to Gukesh in Singapore 2024. (See our 2024 entry for the next match.)