As most if not all of you know by now, Sergey Karjakin is on the outs for the 2022 Candidates tournament (scheduled for Madrid, Spain, starting June 16). After his asinine statements in support of the despicable Russian invasion of Ukraine, FIDE banned from official FIDE-rated events for six months, a time frame that includes the Candidates. As disgusting as his comments were and are - and I was critical of his being a Putin fanboy years before Russia's latest act of aggression against Ukraine (no ban for Karjakin's overtly pro-Putin stance after the latter's earlier invasions of Ukraine and Georgia?) - I don't like this precedent. The history of chess is full of terrible politics and misdeeds by individuals who didn't receive bans; what makes Karjakin so special?
Karjakin has appealed the ban, but assuming it stands, the player with the best rating at the end of this month gets it - provided he has played in at least 30 classical games over the past year. Ding Liren has the rating with room to spare, with a 30 point lead over Levon Aronian, but because of China's COVID restrictions he has had far fewer opportunities to play than most of his rivals. That insulated his high rating from harm, but also meant that he needed to get in 26 games from the time of Karjakin's disqualification in March until the end of this month.
Needless to say, it has happened - or rather, has been happening, though it's not quite finished. First, there was a four player quadruple round-robin. He defeated all his rivals with 3.5-.5 scores, going 10.5/12 overall and picking up around 12 points for his trouble. Then there was a six-game match with Wei Yi. The first five games were drawn before Ding won the finale, losing just one rating point overall. That left eight games to go, and he'll get that with two games to spare in the last event, which is ongoing, a six player double-round robin. So far he's 2-1, down one rating point.
All told, as of this writing he's undefeated in 21 games and has gained around 10 points - a very impressive result, to put it mildly. He is and has been one of the world's best players for years, so it's not as if the result is beyond belief; nevertheless, the whole affair is ethically iffy. Granted, Ding's situation is unfortunate, but there are good reasons why FIDE does not accept events where all the players are from the same country (except for events like national championships) for round-robin norm tournaments, and forces Candidates from the same country to play each other in the first games of each cycle. Even if all the players are as honest as can be, the incentives lend themselves to fishy outcomes. (Read works on Soviet chess for endless examples of such chicanery.)
Anyway, here are a couple of Ding's recent games. The first is his win in the last game of the match with Wei Yi, and the second game - also against Wei Yi - is a draw from the ongoing event. Both are interesting, albeit in very different ways. Have a look.