Ding Liren's 2010-11 TWIC-ipedia

This is the fourth post in a short series to learn more about GM Ding Liren's chess career. In the previous post, Ding Liren's Rise to the GM title (March 2023), I wrote,

The year 2009 was the Chinese GM's breakthrough year. What about 2010 and after? I'll look at that in the next post.

The following chart starts where the chart from 'Rise to the GM title' ended: 'October 2009, he became China's 30th grandmaster'.

Ding Liren (wikipedia.org)

My first thought when seeing the absence of events from 2010-11 was that the GM might have been pursuing his studies. He was 17 years old at the start of 2010. Then I searched issues of TWIC ('The Week in Chess' by Mark Crowther) in the range 800-899, which nearly covers the two missing years. I came up with the following list. The date and the name of each event are from the corresponding issue of TWIC.

• 2010-05-03 TWIC 808 : IX Asian Continental Chess Championship
• 2010-06-07 TWIC 813 : Chinese Championships
• 2010-06-21 TWIC 815 : 1st Danzhou Tournament
• 2010-09-06 TWIC 826 : 1st Campomanes Memorial Cup Open
• 2011-02-21 TWIC 850 : 10th Aeroflot Open
• 2011-03-21 TWIC 854 : Chinese World Teams Selection Tournament
• 2011-04-04 TWIC 856 : FIDE Zonal 3.5
• 2011-04-11 TWIC 857 : Chinese Championships 2011
• 2011-05-30 TWIC 864 : 2nd Danzhou GM
• 2011-06-30 TWIC 867 : 1st Chinese Celebrity Rapid
• 2011-07-11 TWIC 870 : 1st ch-CHN Rapid 2011
• 2011-09-05 TWIC 878 : FIDE World Cup 2011
• 2011-10-10 TWIC 883 : 1st Qin Huangdao Open

Of the 13 events, most of them important, only two are mentioned in Wikipedia. Why is this? I suspect the reason is something like that given by Crowther in 'TWIC 854 : Chinese World Teams Selection Tournament' (italics mine):-

The Chinese held an 8 player double round robin event to select a player for their squad for the World Team Championships later in the year. Yu Yangyi won the tournament. I couldn't find any games but Chinese isn't a strong point of mine.

Note that the list doesn't include team events, of which I counted five. I'm not suggesting that Wikipedia should present an exhaustive account of Ding Liren's career, but there must be some acceptable compromise between nothing and everything.