Ding Liren's Immortal Game — Chinese League 2017

A League Match That Became History

The Chinese Chess League is a team competition, a working environment rather than a stage. Games are played for board points, and even the strongest grandmasters treat league rounds as professional duty. That is part of what makes this game so striking: nobody expected immortality from a Saturday fixture in November 2017.

Ding Liren arrived at the board as one of the strongest players on earth, rated around 2774 and already deep into the extraordinary unbeaten streak in classical chess that would eventually reach roughly one hundred games. Across from him, playing White, sat Bai Jinshi, a talented Chinese grandmaster born in 1999, eighteen years old and improving fast. On paper it was a routine pairing of an elite player against a rising junior.

The opening gave no hint of what was coming. Bai opened with the queen's pawn and the game entered a Ragozin Defence, a respectable modern system in which Black accepts a slightly loose structure in return for active pieces. Ding castled, opened the centre, and developed his bishop to b7, pointing it down the long diagonal at White's kingside. To most observers the position looked like a normal, roughly balanced middlegame. It was, in fact, a loaded weapon. The full game now sits alongside the most famous chess games ever recorded.

The Knight Goes First: 18...Nxg2

The attack began not with the rook but with a knight. On move 18 Ding played Nxg2, capturing the pawn that shielded White's castled king and offering the knight for it. The idea draws on one of the oldest themes in chess tactics: when a bishop controls the long diagonal aimed at a castled king, the g2 square is the hinge on which the whole defence turns. Remove the g2 pawn and the king stands in the open, staring down the diagonal at the bishop on b7.

Bai accepted with 19.Kxg2, as he more or less had to, since declining would leave him a pawn down with a wrecked kingside anyway. Material was now level in a crude count, knight for two pawns to White, but the real currency of the position had changed. Black's queen, rooks and light-squared bishop all had open lines toward a king with no pawn shelter.

Still, a knight sacrifice for exposure is within the normal vocabulary of grandmaster chess. Strong players make such decisions regularly when the compensation is clear. What separated this game from a merely good attacking effort was the move Ding had prepared as the follow-up, a move that belongs to a different vocabulary altogether.

The Immortal Move: 19...Rd4

Ding's reply to 19.Kxg2 was Rd4, and it is the move for which the game is remembered. The rook slid from d8 to d4, a square defended by White's pawn on e3. White could simply take it. The rook attacked nothing decisive, defended nothing, and pinned nothing. By every conventional measure it was a blunder. It was, instead, one of the deepest attacking moves of the modern era.

The point is brutal once seen. If White captures with exd4, the e-file and the dark squares around his king fall apart at the same moment, and Black's queen invades with checks along the light squares where the b7 bishop commands everything. Engine analysis confirmed what Ding had calculated at the board: accepting the rook loses by force. Declining it, as Bai did, left the rook standing on d4 like an occupying army, ready to swing across the fourth rank into the attack.

Placing a whole rook en prise purely to gain a tempo of attack is the signature of the romantic age, the gesture of Anderssen's Immortal Game of 1851. Seeing it played soundly, against a grandmaster, in the engine era, is why commentators reached immediately for the word immortal.

The King Hunt and the Finish

What followed was not a single combination but a sustained execution. With the rook established on d4 and the white king unable to find shelter, Ding fed piece after piece into the attack. The rook swung along the fourth rank, the queen probed the light squares, and the bishop on b7 never stopped breathing down the long diagonal. Bai defended resourcefully, returning material and running his king toward the centre, but every defensive try met a prepared answer.

This is the quality that separates the game from a flashy miniature. Romantic brilliancies of the 19th century often succeeded because the defence was poor. Here the defence was modern and stubborn, and the attack still crashed through, because Ding had calculated the forcing lines to the end. The white king was dragged from its ruined kingside into open ground, harried by checks, with no square offering rest.

The game ended after Black's 32nd move. White resigned with mate unavoidable, his king caught in a net woven by Ding's queen, rook and bishop. From the knight sacrifice on move 18 to resignation, the attack had run for fourteen moves without a single inaccuracy. Players who want to understand how such attacks are constructed will find the underlying principles in our guide to chess strategy.

Why the Game Stunned the Chess World

The reaction was immediate and unusually unanimous. Grandmasters and commentators shared the game within hours, and the comparison drawn again and again was to the great sacrificial masterpieces of the romantic era: Anderssen's Immortal and Evergreen games, Morphy's Opera Game. Several leading players called it the finest game they had seen in years, and it was quickly nicknamed Ding's Immortal.

Part of the shock was the author. Ding Liren had a reputation as one of the most solid players alive, a master of harmony and defence rather than fire. The streak that made him famous was an unbeaten run, not a string of brilliancies. That such a player could produce the most romantic attacking game of the decade reminded everyone that style is a choice, not a limit.

The other part was the era. In 2017 every spectator had an engine running, and most sacrifices are exposed within seconds as unsound or routine. Ding's rook sacrifice survived silicon scrutiny completely. The machine's approval did not diminish the human achievement; it certified it. A move that looked impossible was simply correct, found at the board by a human being calculating further than the game seemed to demand. Profiles of the modern elite, Ding among them, can be found in our guide to famous chess players.

Legacy: The Immortal and the Crown

The game's standing has only grown. It is now a fixture in anthologies of the greatest games, taught as a model of attacking the castled king and of the long-diagonal sacrifice on g2. In the long sweep of chess history it marks something genuinely new: the first universally acclaimed immortal game produced by a Chinese player, a signal of where the centre of gravity in world chess was shifting.

For Ding personally it became the founding document of his legend. The unbeaten streak carried him to the top of the world rankings, and in April 2023 he defeated Ian Nepomniachtchi in tiebreaks to become the 17th undisputed world champion, the first from China, a story told in full in our history of the World Chess Championships. When commentators searched for evidence that the quiet, solid Ding possessed championship steel, they pointed first to the rook on d4.

There is a pleasing symmetry in the details. The game was played, like every rated game in the world, with pieces of the Staunton pattern, the design Jaques of London first manufactured in 1849 and named for Howard Staunton. An immortal game from 2017 was played on a design already immortal itself.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Why is the Bai Jinshi vs Ding Liren game called Ding's Immortal?

The name follows a long tradition in chess of christening games of exceptional sacrificial beauty as Immortals, beginning with Adolf Anderssen's Immortal Game against Kieseritzky in London in 1851. When Ding Liren gave up a knight on g2 and then placed his rook en prise with 19...Rd4 in the Chinese Chess League on 4 November 2017, commentators immediately reached for the same word. The game had the defining qualities of the romantic masterpieces: material thrown onto the fire, a king dragged into the open, and a forcing attack that proved completely sound under engine analysis. Within days it was being called Ding's Immortal across chess media, and the name has stuck ever since.

Q: What was the key move in Ding Liren's Immortal Game?

The move that defines the game is 19...Rd4, played immediately after the knight sacrifice 18...Nxg2 had stripped White's king of its cover. The rook moved to a square where it could simply be captured by the e3 pawn, yet taking it would have opened lines that led to a forced mating attack along the light squares, where Ding's bishop on b7 raked the long diagonal toward the exposed king. The move is extraordinary because it serves no ordinary purpose: it does not win material and it does not defend anything. It exists purely to bring the rook into the attack at the cost of offering it for nothing, the hallmark of the great sacrificial games of chess history.

Q: Who is Bai Jinshi, the player on the losing side?

Bai Jinshi is a Chinese grandmaster, born in 1999, who was one of the country's promising young players when the game was played in November 2017. He was a teenager facing one of the strongest players in the world, and it is worth stressing that he did not lose through weak play in any obvious sense. His opening was respectable and his middlegame plan was natural. He simply ran into one of those rare days when his opponent saw further than the normal horizon of the game. Like Kieseritzky, Dufresne and Bardeleben before him, Bai Jinshi is remembered chiefly as the other name on an immortal scoresheet, a fate that says more about Ding's brilliance than about his own ability.

Q: Did Ding Liren go on to become World Champion?

Yes. In April 2023 Ding Liren defeated Ian Nepomniachtchi in Astana to become the 17th undisputed World Chess Champion and the first Chinese player to hold the title. The match went to rapid tiebreaks, and Ding won the deciding game with the black pieces. The 2017 Immortal against Bai Jinshi is now read as an early signal of what was coming: it was played during the unbeaten run of roughly one hundred classical games that carried Ding into the world elite, and it showed that beneath his famously solid style lay a player capable of calculating forcing sacrificial attacks as deeply as anyone alive. He held the title until losing to Gukesh Dommaraju in 2024.