4.h3: GM Surya Shekhar Ganguly uses Ding Liren’s move to explain how role of seconds, game prep and chess itself has changed

Viswanathan Anand thought it was a typo on the screen. Anish Giri joked it was a mouse slip from Ding Liren. Even Ian Nepomniachtchi, sitting across the board from the Chinese GM, was forced into a double take.
With the seemingly innocuous fourth move in the second game of the World Chess Championship, Ding had managed to make jaws drop — from Super GMs to the throng of Redditors and Twitterers and Instagrammers, who identify as chess fans. The Chinese GM, using an idea from his second, Hungarian GM Richard Rapport, had moved his pawn to h3 in the fourth move of the game with white.
Nepomniachtchi — who commentator Irina Krush would later describe as being “sphinx-like” in his reaction to winning Game 2 — certainly couldn’t hide his surprise. Initially, he thought it was a pawn to g3. As soon as he had processed the move, he smirked, had three swigs of water, then raised his eyebrows more than once: an indicator that he couldn’t transcribe if the move was foolhardy or a trap laid a diabolical genius.

The Russian then spent the next 10 minutes contemplating his reply. And while both players have spent much longer on other moves over four games, Nepo later called the move “venomous”.
“It happens, it happens. You try to play g3, your hand slips to the right (and plays h3). This is crazy!” said Anish Giri in Chess.com commentary. Even though it was a joke, it was a legitimate way of rationalising a move that is mostly played at the amateur level.
Giri’s shock was shared GM Viswanathan Anand in FIDE’s commentary, who uncharacterically burst out laughing.
So why would a GM, competing at chess’ grandest stage, play a move that is only popular among the amateurs?
“In Game 2 the move did not work, sure. But this is the kind of idea that even the world champion’s team would probably be missing in its analysis. This is modern chess,” GM Surya Shekhar Ganguly told The Indian Express.
As it turned out, the nervous and mentally troubled Ding mixed up his lines after 4.h3 in Game 2 and went on to lose. But maybe in years to come, we’ll hear of the ripples it caused in Nepo’s camp as his sherpas scrambled to understand where Ding was going with the move.

Ganguly reasoned that with moves and game plans being dominated chess engines over the past decade (and AI in the last five-seven years), having an unpredictable novelty like h3 can be the gamechanger.
“Modern chess has evolved since the Garry Kasparov era or Anand-Vladimir Kramnik times. The game plan has changed. Now it’s more about how unpredictable you can get. You don’t repeat the same stuff on the board. The change was happening during Anand’s time. But you would never see a h3 back in those days. It would be almost impossible to imagine such a thing back then at a high level. Kasparov or Anand would not do this,” said Ganguly, who helped five-time world champion Anand scale many tricky summits as his second.
His explanation is simple: everybody in the sport at the elite level has chess engines and the best hardware. Computers calculate moves and catch on-board errors so quickly that the time the players are in the press conference minutes after a game, even the journals know which moves were blunders. With modern-day chess engines and AI, any player who knows how to operate the software, will also know how to analyse moves on the board. So, to catch a Super GM — who has spent months preparing for the World Championship with his team — off-guard on the board, you have to pull out something that might even feel amateurish. Even if it means people think you’re playing checkers while your opponent is playing chess.
“A novelty, a new idea, is more effective because sometimes the computer will not understand the practical aspect of it. Or the computer will ignore it because it’s not the top choice. When you use a computer, it will tell you the best move. So the second’s role is now becoming more and more practical. The opening approach has now changed. Instead of going very deep, it’s now more about how broad you can get (with your analysis and prep). You try different things which are not the top choice of the computer, because what is the computer’s top choice that is already being analysed,” he added.
Back in his days of working with Anand for his World Chess Championship campaign, Ganguly once spent 27 hours at a stretch with other members of Team Anand preparing for a game. While it’s likely that people in Team Nepo and Team Ding are putting themselves through similar chess benders, the things they’re working on is probably different.

Ganguly pointed out that with computers becoming the backbone of every World Championship campaign, the profile of the people you had as seconds in your team was also changing. Back in Anand’s days, Kasparov had enled the services of Kramnik. Both Russians later helped the Indian as he trained to take on Veselin Topalov in 2010.
“In Anand’s time, the scenario was already changing. But during Kasparov’s time, it would make a huge difference who is helping the player, who is the second, who is in the team and so on. Today, a Magnus Carlsen cannot say he has a stronger machine or a better preparation. Because everybody has the same access. Earlier, there was the aura that these players were in Kasparov’s team. Now it’s more about who is working the machine,” he pointed out.
Ganguly pointed out that from Anand’s era to the current Carlsen era, the edge machines had over humans had not changed. But players like Carlsen had changed the fabric of the sport.

“Back in Anand’s era also, engines were defeating humans. Now also engines are defeating humans. But if we take the same preparation now that was done in Anand’s time, it’s already obsolete. What was the top preparation just three years back for Magnus, he will not play that now. Because machines have already identified a solution (to counter it).
“For people who grew up watching Anand, Kasparov and Kramnik, for them chess would be all about playing a principled line. But players who grew up seeing Carlsen or Hikaru Nakamura, now the entire pattern has changed,” he added.
As a way to explain this, he points out that of the 20 legal first moves that a player can do with white, Carlsen has probably tried every one of them.
“And now look at how many first moves Anand or Kasparov have made with white in their lifetime. Carlsen’s main thing is, I don’t want to be deep, I want to be so unpredictable you cannot guess what I am playing. So usually when a player plays with Magnus, they don’t know what to prepare, because they don’t know what is coming. This is what you will see with the younger generation. Look at Arjun (Erigaisi). With white, it’s almost impossible to guess what he will play because they grew up seeing players like Magnus and Hikaru,” added Ganguly.