Reigning World Champion Ding Liren’s slump has led to many dire predictions about the fate of the crown that currently rests uneasily on his head. But given how the history of world championships is drenched in cloak-and-dagger tactics and paranoia, one wonders if there could be a hint of exaggeration in this run of results to blindside the 18-year-old challenger to the throne, D Gukesh from India.

Former world champion Viswanathan Anand, though, dismisses such talk. “I don’t think Ding has been pretending for two years (to be in bad form) against an opponent he didn’t even know was going to be. No, this is nuts. We’re reading way too much into it,” says Anand.

He says that in “shorter doses” there can be an explanation for a string of bad results, especially closer to the world championship. But he dismisses any talk of a player playing badly to lull an opponent into a false sense of comfort. Anand likens it to Kremlinology (the Western world reading information coming from a secretive Soviet Union back in the day and trying to interpret the signs).

“People sometimes, in games before a world championship match, they’ll do things more adventurously or they’ll play something they’ve never played before and the other player has to ask, is this part of the match prep? Is it not? In a sense, the paranoia is increasing on both sides and signaling becomes (commonplace),” the Indian legend said.

“But there’s an element of Kremlinology here. You start to over-interpret stuff and then you fall in love with it. At some point they would read every signal from the Kremlin and say, this is what they’re going to do. By the third or fourth interpretation, you would be asking yourself, are you still standing on the ground? Because the problem is once it’s in your head, it doesn’t even have to exist. Your head will just keep going by itself. So I think you should be able to take in this information and block it from your thoughts very quickly.”