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Gukesh D is the 18th world chess champion at just 18 years of age. His heart-stopping title match against Ding Liren came down to an inexplicable endgame blunder in the 14th and final game. The challenger had taken the match lead in Game 11 only to lose in Game 12, as Ding looked set to once again come from behind to win in a world championship match. All tied up going into final classical game, we looked inevitably headed for the simplest of draws when Ding blundered a technical endgame win. Gukesh took advantage and now stands astride the chess world, $1.35 million richer, as its new king.
Let’s recap Games 8-14, notating moves which actually occurred during the games in bold, and hypothetical variations which did not occur but could have in italics. If you missed out, check out our preview piece and recap of Games 1-7.
Game 8: Ding 1/2 – 1/2 Gukesh
As we crossed the halfway mark of the match with the scores all tied, Game 8 saw big misses by both players in an absolute thriller! Ding Liren opened up with 1.c4 with the white pieces, marking the fourth different opening move that he had played in four games with white, presumably in an attempt to keep Team Gukesh on their toes. It appeared that the challenger was more familiar with the line that arose in the game, however, with his completely new pawn to f6 on move 7 sending Ding into the tank for a 14-minute think early on.
It was Ding who made the first slip in the middlegame, and with the lax rook to b1? he was punished for not earlier getting his king out of the line of fire:
Note to self: In these structures with white, having moved your f-pawn early on, you need to find time to get your king into the corner. Here Gukesh with black found the correct response almost immediately with pawn to b5! (which he couldn’t play earlier, since the rook on c1 was staring daggers at the black queen on c7). There are two white pieces attacking that b5-pawn and only one defending it, but it’s only a temporary pawn sacrifice, because after pawn captures pawn on b5, black’s queen to b6, check! and king to f1, allows a recapture of the b5-pawn and black is looking good. Then, Ding’s bishop to b2 was another inaccuracy which allowed black’s f7-bishop to gobble up the pawn on a2, and black had two huge connected passed pawns on the a- and b-files and a commanding position. Just like that, Gukesh just needs to steady the ship, get into a winning endgame, and he can take the lead in the match!
But immediately, disaster struck for the challenger! After bishop to d4, attacking the black queen, it’s time for another round of Guess the Move! With black to play, what would you do in this position?
Did you find knight to c5? If so, congrats—the queen needs to stay to guard the pawns, so moving a knight to c5 is indeed the move, except … that’s exactly what Gukesh found, and it was a blunder which eroded all of his advantage! Huh? Look closely: both of black’s knights can jump to that square, and Gukesh chose the wrong one! Using the a6-knight for the job looks natural to get it closer to the center, but he needed to have instead picked up his d7-knight for the job. What’s the difference? It’s a tactical point: in one variation, white’s rook and queen are threatening to load up on the pinned c5-knight from the c1 and c2 squares, meaning that the e8-rook would need to come across to c8 to help with the defense, opening the way for white’s g2 bishop to come to h3, attacking that rook and the d7-knight—which wouldn’t still be there if that was the knight he’d moved to c5. There’s no way to avoid exchanging a pair of minor pieces, and such are the slim margins in a razor-sharp position such as this, the position back to equal. Gah!!
We got to see a relative of that variation in the game, but with a crucial twist, because that knight would become the central focus of the next passage of play: as a few moves later Ding came up with the ingenious plan of sending his queen via e1 to f2!, where it joined the bishop in a battery attack against that poor knight, and with a single loose move by Gukesh suddenly the champion Ding had gone from lost to winning in a matter of minutes:
Ding stated at the postgame press conference that he hadn’t realized that he had a win on his hands, but in fact he did: with that c5-horse’s hooves tied, white’s dark-squared bishop stepped back to e3 and allowed the knight to come via d4 to c6!, causing all sorts of problems and leaving black with nothing better than to sacrifice the exchange by trading its rook for white’s knight. Now, despite black’s connected passed pawns, white had a material advantage (a rook for a knight and a pawn) which tipped the evaluation in its favor.
But wait! The players at the board didn’t know the “objective” evaluation of the engine, and it was quite reasonable for Ding to have assessed the position as roughly equal, given black’s compensation with those two pawns. Add in to the mix that Ding was running low on time (he made it to move 40 with only three minutes to spare), to the horror of his fans around the world, he decided the best course of action was to make a draw by acquiescing to a repeat of moves.
But wait, again!! Despite having the inferior position on the board, for the second time in the match Gukesh opted to reject the repetition of moves and play on, repeating only twice and then stationing his queen on an attacking square in white’s camp as he demanded that Ding keep finding the correct solution at the board. I love this as a practical decision from Gukesh—showing Ding that he’s willing to fight on unexpectedly instead of accepting a draw where he’s expected to, after that very same decision won Ding the world championship in tiebreaks last year.
And indeed, in this game Gukesh did demonstrate in short order that black’s position wasn’t so bad, as the passed pawn and the white king’s relative lack of safety did ensure that white couldn’t (or, thought it wise not to) push too hard. The excitement was short-lived, however, as the players traded queens and the passed pawns were liquidated, and they agreed to a draw on move 51, down to an opposite-colored bishops 4-pawns-versus-3 endgame.
What a rollercoaster! With the advantage swinging both ways, each side both earned and lost and gave and saved winning chances. At this point in the match, it seemed as though a bit of a pattern had started to emerge: Gukesh was playing more aggressively and was appearing to be better-prepared in the opening, and while Ding was burning a lot of clock early and often falling into inferior positions, he was counter-punching like nobody’s business and testing Gukesh’s resolve—a test that the 18-year-old was so far meeting with aplomb. These gents were giving us a great battle!
Game 9: Gukesh 1/2 – 1/2 Ding
Before the third rest day, Gukesh opened up with 1.d4, and we finally got a Catalan Opening (defined by white following that first move up with pawn to g3 and bishop to g2 in short order), which felt overdue in a match between two tried-and-tested Catalan players. Ding responded with a system in which he played playing bishop to b4, check and then bishop back to b7 on moves 3 and 4, to lure white’s bishop to d2 to dictate the terms of that piece’s development.
Team Gukesh had once again found some fertile ground in a common opening, and succeeded in making Ding eat up a good portion of his clock with some finessing of the move order (a reminder: the players get 120 minutes to make their first 40 moves, and then an additional 30 minutes plus 30 seconds per move to take them to the end of the game).
It was an interesting game worthy of study, but with so much going on in the other games we won’t dwell on it too long here. Queens and one pair of rooks had come off the board by move 28, and we had a knight-versus-bishop endgame (with one rook and four pawns per side), which between super-Grandmasters was always going to end in peacefully. The players scarcely needed to stop to think for the rest of the game as they slowly negotiated the pieces off the board, and on move 54 we were down to bare kings, and the game ended in a draw.
Game 10: Ding 1/2 – 1/2 Gukesh
Game 10 saw a positively ho-hum draw, with very little happening. Ding Liren opened up with 1.d4 and we saw a repeat of the London System that we had in Game 6, with a symmetrical pawn structure and the queens exchanged off the board by move 14.
I won’t waste your time here: the players only took one long think each as the game failed to spring into life, as they eventually liquidated into a same-colored bishops endgame, and found a draw by threefold repetition on move 36. Onto Game 11!
Game 11: Gukesh 1 – 0 Ding
Gukesh again seemed to win the battle out of the opening in Game 11, finding a novelty in a sharp line in the Reversed Blumenfeld Gambit where he opened with 1.Nf3 with white. Gukesh’s play forced Ding to eat into his clock: after thinking for nearly 40 minutes on move 4, the surprise reply pawn to a3 on move 5 forced Ding to immediately burn another 20 minutes on his response.
It’s a sign of bad time management when a player takes two long thinks in a row (particularly in the opening), but as had been Ding’s wont in this match, he thereafter started to play very quickly, and after Gukesh seemed to have mixed up his files Ding looked to have the better position on the board, with pawn to b5? by the challenger a mistake:
With that unwise pawn push there’s suddenly a huge weakness in white’s position: it’s all about the battle for the c5-square, and black’s b8-knight is heading there via d7, where it will dominate the center and queenside of the board and prove to be a massive problem for white. Remember: pawns don’t move backwards! Gukesh was in turn forced to invest his own time in a long think, taking a whopping 60 minutes on his response, pawn to g3, the longest think of his entire career.
We had a double-edged middlegame where the players had to find the right plan, and it was ultimately Ding who cracked and Gukesh who took advantage. Ding hit on an amazing idea to trap white’s queen which would have been heroic if it worked—unfortunately for him in the precise position the tactics didn’t shake out to his advantage, and the queen could find a flight square or a trade in each variation—and so the three precious moves he spent on the plan allowed Gukesh to take over: Ding’s pawn to g6, pawn to h5, and bishop to g6 were interspersed with Gukesh’s pawn to a4! (opening a3 for the bishop), pawn to b6!, (both hitting the black queen on c7 and blockading black’s b7-pawn), and bishop to a3!, threatening and then capturing the black knight on that all-important c5 square.
Remember I mentioned that the c5-square was important? Now it was Gukesh’s turn to take control of that square, as white’s b1 knight came to life by traveling via a3, c2, a1 (that’s one for the aesthetes – a knight jump to the corner of the board!), b3, and finally to c5, as black’s two rooks loaded up on the b-file. (Note the subtle importance of putting the pawn all the way on b6 as mentioned in the passage above, stopping white’s c5-knight from being kicked by black’s b-pawn.)
Ding had only left himself under eight minutes for his last 15 moves before the time control, and inevitably he cracked in a complicated position on move 28, leaving Gukesh a game-winning tactic with a blunder he certainly would not have made with more time to think. Here we are again with another edition of Guess the Move! With the world chess championship on the line, with white to play, what’s your move here?
Gukesh found the beautiful queen takes knight on c6!!, and immediately Ding resigned. White has simply won a piece for nothing: the white queen is protected by the bishop on g2 so there’s no point in the queen taking it, and if black’s pawn takes queen, then simply rook takes rook on b8! and the black queen is pinned to the king and can’t escape being captured herself. In each variation, white has simply picked up black’s knight for free.
And with that, after seven draws in a row, Gukesh took the lead of the chess world championship for the first time! Another complicated and absorbing game had resulted in Gukesh finally breaking through on the back of a Ding blunder in time trouble. Both had played well until the end, and while Ding could take heart from his superb middlegame play, he would be left to rue his time management and opening preparation costing him yet again.
Game 12: Ding 1 – 0 Gukesh
Down a point with three games to go, Ding Liren would need to come up with a win to keep his dreams of retaining his world championship title alive. He had come from behind three times (!) in his 2023 match against Ian Nepomniachtchi, and gone on to win the title. Could he do it again?
In his second-to-last game with white—and therefore potentially his best chance to push for a win—he opened with 1.c4, as he had in Game 8, though Gukesh replied with pawn to e6 rather than the pawn to e5 that he had played on opening day.
As it turned out, in this English Opening game Ding would demonstrate that he’s the master of the comeback, as he produced a positional masterpiece where he totally crushed Gukesh without the latter being able to really identify where he went wrong. Let’s take a look at the position after Gukesh’s 17th move (and a 26-minute think), bishop to g6:
Material is equal, but white looks poised to dominate: Its rooks and queen are on the semi-open central files, its two bishops are patrolling long diagonals, its knights have found good squares, its pawns are harmonized and protecting key outposts, and its king is safe. Black, on the other hand, doesn’t have a bad position but is comparatively befogged: the light-squared bishop is now biting on granite on g6, its e-pawn is isolated, its c6-knight is tied to the defense of that pawn and is blocking the advance of its c-pawn, and its b8-rook is on a terrible square. More generally, black has no obvious move or plan, while white has a very straightforward idea: barrel through the center starting with pawn to d4!
Although we again had mutual time trouble in the run-up to move 40 (they were both down to about 18 minutes with that many moves to go), Ding looked like the greatest chess player ever to have lived as he coolly pressed to a victory, finding the key move in the position below after Gukesh’s bishop to g5:
Knight to f4! by Ding and he was cooking. Black has no good options: if it doesn’t kill off that knight, knight captures bishop on g6 will cause a devastating breach of the king’s safety barrier, and the continuation we saw in the game, bishop captures knight on f4 and bishop recaptures was no better: now white’s dark-squared bishop and b5-knight are homing in on that c7 pawn, the capture of which would further strengthen white’s central d-pawn. Gukesh could find defenses to most of the immediate threats, but it was like playing Whack-A-Mole as Ding kept piling on the pressure.
Ding had a supreme position which was a delight to play; he pushed his pawns and picked up two of black’s as he pursued the simplest winning plan—in doing so, he bypassed two beautiful continuations that he understandably had not bothered to calculate (humiliatingly trapping black’s rook with his knight, and later flashily sacrificing his queen for a rook). He did finish in style, however, with rook takes pawn on g7!:
It’s now checkmate-in-7-moves even against perfect play: if king takes rook, then white has bishop takes rook on f8, check!, and the d7-pawn is coronated on the next move. Gukesh didn’t want to suffer through that humiliation; instead he resigned.
A superlative game by Ding and the match was even with two games to go! Ding Liren truly is one of the great enigmas: a bundle of nerves and blundering the game away one day; as cool as James Dean and playing perfect chess the next. Gukesh had barely put a foot wrong, and had been left patting his pockets in search of his missing wallet in just 39 moves. The comeback king had done it again!
Game 13: Gukesh 1/2 – 1/2 Ding
In his final classical game with the white pieces Gukesh opened up with white with 1.e4, and Ding played pawn to e6, the French Defense just as we’d seen in Game 1. It showed that both players were ready for a fight, and Gukesh again found an opening near-novelty with another pawn to a3 on move 7, forcing Ding into yet another long think—before long he had again used up almost an hour while Gukesh had used less than a minute.
Gukesh showed that he had a plan by early on trading his light-squared bishop for black’s advanced knight on c4, not an instinctive move since that bishop is normally the heart of white’s play in a French Defense setup. Gukesh was playing well and enjoying his position, and in the middlegame he looked poised to take over with better harmonized pieces, with bishop to f4! a star move:
Black can’t recapture with rook takes bishop, because the simple tactic queen to e5! would fork both rooks and win the game for white. That bishop now threatens to become a menace on the b8-h2 diagonal, but Gukesh soon made the decision to trade that bishop for the e7-knight, sensing that his knight was stronger than his opponent’s bishop.
With Ding (and to a lesser extent Gukesh) once again running low on time (the champion left himself just over one minute per move for his last 20 before the time control), we shortly thereafter reached a crucial passage of play which could have decided the world championship crown. After Gukesh had played rook from d1 to e1 in the below position, Ding made the first blunder with queen to f7?:
It’s a double-edged, strategically messy position where it was not easy to calculate the right path to safety, especially with such short time. Strictly necessary was for Ding to instead trade the queen for two rooks with queen takes rook on e1!, and rook takes rook and rook takes rook, check on that square. We would have been left with a fun material imbalance where white’s knight (coming to e4) would be significantly stronger than black’s bishop, and black would need to find the right defensive continuation (with the two black rooks harassing white’s queen from the e-file) to stabilize and get to a drawn endgame.
As it was, Ding had left the door open for Gukesh to find the winning continuation rook takes on e8!, queen takes on e8, and knight to e4!, where with a pair of rooks off the board and a superior minor piece he would have had a suffocating tactical advantage. But, after only 59 seconds of thinking, Gukesh returned the blunder with knight to e4? immediately, leaving too many pieces in the way, and Ding somehow found a superhuman equalizing resource with two consecutive only moves, with rook to f8!!, and then after Gukesh’s knight to d6, rook to c7!!:
What a mess! Putting that rook on f8 (for the third time in the game, if you include when he castled) was the move of a world champion, with it being the only square which would keep the defense of the bishop but duck out of the knight-fork that came next, while putting the rook on c7 balanced out the knight’s attack on black queen, with it somehow working out fine for black in all of the myriad tactical variations that could follow. Incredible!
Ding had found some oxygen, and shortly managed to trade off one pair of rooks, make the time control, and kill white’s knight in order to get to a drawn heavy-piece endgame with his head still attached to his shoulders. Some 35 moves later, after Gukesh had tried in vain to pierce black’s defenses, the players found a threefold repetition and a draw. It was an incredible save by Ding, one worthy of all the praise in the chess world.
So: heading into the final game in the classical portion of the match, Ding Liren would have the white pieces, and the opportunity to win the match at the buzzer, to retain his title. Gukesh’s best chance at becoming champion during the classical portion of the match had slipped through his hands, and would be left to rue not finding the knockout blow yet again. With Game 14 lurking, it was anybody’s guess how it would all end!
Game 14: Ding 0 – 1 Gukesh
If the players are all tied after 14 classical games (a reminder that they need to play an even number of games with each color, because of white’s first-mover advantage), the world championship match would go to a day of shorter-format tiebreaks. In my view this isn’t ideal, since rapid and blitz is an entirely different beast to classical chess—it would be like the Rugby World Cup resolving a tie by having the teams play a game of Rugby Sevens. In an ideal world perhaps the match would be extended by two games at a time until one player earned a decisive advantage, but there are reasonable fears of a John Isner-Nicolas Mahut scenario, and so tiebreaks it is.
Most of the talk before Game 14 was about how Ding would be the unquestioned favorite in tiebreaks. While it’s true that Ding is the more intuitive player and higher-rated in both short-format disciplines (he’s world No. 2 versus Gukesh’s No. 47 in rapid, and No. 6 against No. 85 in blitz), with his lack of matchplay in 2024 and the topsy-turvy nature of this match, I could see each player having confidence in their game. Nevertheless, as Game 14 progressed it was clearly Gukesh who wanted to push the envelope and keep searching for a win, while Ding seemed content to take the battle to overtime.
Ding opened up again with 1.Nf3, and Gukesh avoided the London System and fought early on for control of the center. Gukesh again found himself 30 minutes up on the clock early, but Ding had everything under control: after some low-risk middlegame intrigue, it appeared that everything was going to end quietly. Ding had a few opportunities to trade down into a safe endgame, and opted to sacrifice a pawn in order to trade the queens off the board on move 30 as the following endgame arose (with the bishop on an interesting square on a8…):
This rook endgame is drawn with proper play—the kings aren’t going to get checkmated in the middle of the board and so become active participants in the play, and with the rooks and bishops hanging around, there are too many moving parts for black to get its extra pawn down the board to promotion (though black would have the advantage if only the pawns and kings remained). Nevertheless, it’s by no means an automatic draw, and the both players still needed to play principled chess to avoid falling into any traps (Ding had lost a similar drawn endgame against Lê Quang Liêm at this year’s Olympiad).
Super-Grandmasters can hold this endgame with careful calculation, but to err is human, and Gukesh was in the mood to continue the game for as long as possible and probe his opponent’s position. He later said, “My whole strategy for this match was to push as much as possible in every single game with both colors, and it wasn’t working until the last moment, but it just takes one game for the strategy to pay off!” The players maneuvered around for nearly 90 minutes in real time, making more than 30 moves each, as Gukesh kept persistently searching for an edge that wasn’t there, and Ding calmly keeping things under control.
Suddenly, as we were all falling asleep, out of absolutely nowhere, Ding made one careless move, The Blunder Heard ‘Round the World, a simple lapse of concentration that crushingly lost him the world championship and altered the course of chess history. Here we go: one last time, with white having just played rook to f2???, with black to play in the below position, Guess the Move:
This position will be shown in endgame exercises a hundred years from now. Gukesh said he nearly automatically played rook to b3 before identifying that there was a winning move. With the realization that he was about to become world chess champion, he took a few moments to compose himself, check that he had enough time on the clock, and make sure that he’d calculated correctly before playing a continuation that will go down in chess history: rook takes rook on f2!!!, and after king takes rook, bishop to d5!!! traps the white bishop, since it’s on an awful square on a8 and can’t duck out of the way to the northeast or southwest. White has nothing better than bishop takes bishop, and so king takes bishop, king to e3, and king to e5!!! wins the game and the world championship!
With black to move, this position would be a draw, but with white to move it’s a trivial win for black! The black king has the opposition, meaning that the two royals stand directly opposite each other on the same file, and so while both are cut off from moving forwards toward the other, here with white to move it is obliged to take the first backward step. After a few soul-crushing moments of consideration, Ding Liren resigned, as black is going to be able to use the forcefield around its king to belly the white king out of the way, and he will eventually stroll in to gobble up white’s g3 pawn, and convoy its pawns to promotion. See if you can work the word zugzwang (German for “forced move”) into your next dinner party conversation—a situation (e.g. in chess) where a player loses because of their obligation to make a move, rather than because of the position itself!
It was a historic moment—watch the reaction on the ChessBase India broadcast to get a sense of the mood:
What an amazing match! Gukesh had played outstanding chess over the 14 games and he is undoubtedly a richly deserving champion. After a phenomenal 2024 in which he surged up the rating list, won the Candidates Tournament, and led India to the Chess Olympiad title with his second consecutive gold on Board 1, he’s now on top of the chess world. In this match, he out-prepared his opponent, pushed harder and for longer in more situations, and ultimately capitalized on the last mistake. Ding would also have been a worthy repeat champion, and with his wins in Games 1 and 12 probably reached the highest heights in this match, but ultimately came unstuck in heartbreaking fashion at the worst possible moment.
The history books will show that Ding had an extremely strange reign as world champion. In absolute terms he’s unquestionably one of the strongest players ever to push a pawn, but he didn’t win the title in the traditional manner (Magnus Carlsen’s ceding of the title meant that Ding didn’t have to beat the incumbent champion or even finish first in the qualifying Candidates tournament); he had the third-shortest title reign in history (Vasily Smyslov and Mikhail Tal both wore the crown for less than a year as they each defeated and then lost an immediate rematch to Soviet master Mikhail Botvinnik), his time as champion was marked by a personal crisis, a long inactive stretch, and then execrable results at the board, and he’s now stumbled in his first defense in heartbreaking fashion. It’s very unlikely he’ll be back in this spot—a world championship match loss is no longer an automatic Candidates berth, and from a distance I’d guess that Ding wouldn’t want the pressure of the champion title again. My heart breaks for Ding, whose deflated statement “So … no game tomorrow…” at the postgame press conference could be used as an anti-bot detector. He’ll always continue to be one of our absolute favorites, as rarely has any competitor seemed so simultaneously superhuman and human. Ding showed us in this match that he was capable of both the sublime and the ridiculous, of superlative play and toothless collapses, as he stayed unfailingly honest and true to himself. Salute to an absolute king!
As for Gukesh, both the chess world and the real world are his oyster. One can imagine that the 18-year-old will only go from strength to strength at the board, as the intangible power of the world champion title and the tangible benefits of the experience of this match should surely propel him through the 2800 barrier. The young Indian trio of Gukesh, Arjun Erigaisi, and Praggnanandhaa are poised to dominate the next decade of chess, and Carlsen will have it all to do if he wants to avoid losing the world No. 1 ranking he’s held since June of 2011. Gukesh seems like a champion person as well as a champion player, opening his postgame remarks with a long and heartfelt message of thanks to his opponent and his team (which, he revealed, included top players Jan-Krzysztof Duda, Vincent Keymer, Radosław Wojtaszek, and Pentala Harikrishna). Narendra Modi has already hailed Gukesh’s “historic and exemplary” achievement on behalf of chess-mad India, and with the publicity that this match has brought it seems that he’s about to become, without exaggeration, one of the biggest celebrities in the world. He called his shot at 11 years old and thoroughly deserves the glory. Congratulations, champ!
We were privileged to be along for the ride as we were treated to another spellbinding world chess championship in 2024. Ding Liren and Gukesh certainly gave us our money’s worth, with opening novelties, wins with both black and white, razor-sharp tactical battles as well as positional games, time scrambles, heroic saves and devastating misses, masterpieces and blunders, and ultimately an endgame win for the ages. It was another roller-coaster affair, and at no point was it possible to say with any confidence who was going to win. Gukesh is worthy holder of the title of world champion, and our beloved game is in a great place. Thanks for joining us here at Chessfector in recapping these games. See you at the next one!
