A stunning end. those last minutes everyone had assumed it was a draw and Ding had the courage to keep pushing.
Sachdev: "Rg6 is not a move that you'd consider here, right? It's the only move that I feel with black keeps the game going, but it looks more like a losing move than a winning attempt."
Caruana: "If Rg6 is not better for white [Nepomniachtchi], I'd be shocked"
Ding: [plays Rg6]
For some context here, Fabiano played a world championship match against Magnus Carlsen. Every single classical game was drawn, and he then lost 0-3 in the tiebreaks. Fabiano plays relatively weaker in faster time controls, whereas Magnus is also the strongest rapid player in the world by a fairly wide margin.
Carlsen is just a beast.
[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20181003104802/http://ratings.fi...
[2] - https://web.archive.org/web/20181009092541/https://ratings.f...
It's like Heisenberg Uncertainty.
If you look at the Fabiano/Carlsen matches, what you see is that both players know Carlsen is the better calculator, but that Fabiano is going to have better prep almost every single time. He is one of the best theoreticians alive. So what did he play? Give absolutely nothing Carlsen could grab on to when playing black, yet the scariest possible theoretical openings as white, sometimes still being in-book for 5-10 moves over Carlsen. When Fabi was white, he had plenty of ambition and plenty of chances, but the calculation wasn't quite good enough, as Carlsen's worst moves were never significant, visible blunders.
The Fabiano of that championship would have won this year's championship with relative ease, just because he'd never lose with black, and would capitalize on blunders. The way he played really is the best chance he had.
The wonderful spectacle of a match we just got only comes from two players that, inexplicably, kept trying to win with black, and fail. Good for us, but I suspect that for a top professional it's very hard to understand.
Nepo vs Fabiano is +7 =21 -2 (including 3 wins with the black pieces)
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I think a lot of what we're seeing is not about openings, but risk tolerance. Fabiano has incredible, and fighting, opening preparation. But what really matters is what happens after the opening. In high level chess you often find yourself in a scenario where you see two main ideas in a position. One gives you slight winning chances, but basically zero losing chances. The other gives you good winning chances, but the position will be complex and difficult to play - your opponent will also have plenty of winning chances. And Ding, in particular, seemingly had just zero fear of risk this entire match, which is largely what drove everything.
I'd also add this drives another common misconception in chess. If two very strong players both play a game while making a conscious effort to avoid complexity, you'll end up with a draw that has an extremely high level of accuracy. By contrast if they decide to enter into these sort of unclear positions, you'll see even the best in the world make mistakes, and even blunders, because chess is hard! So people outside the game see the mistakes as driving the results, and that's certainly true. But the reason those mistakes are happening is not because the players are just playing weaker, but because even the best in the world will make mistakes in complex positions.