World Chess Championship 2024

Daring Gukesh makes Ding earn his draw in Game 6

If D Gukesh does end up winning the ongoing World Chess Championship in Singapore against the reigning champion Ding Liren he could revisit Game 6 and say 'That was the game-changing moment'.

Facts first. Game 6, played on Sunday, with Gukesh having black, ended in a draw, by a threefold repetition for the third time in the match, after 46 moves. This means that the 14-game match is tied on three points each. Eight more classical games are left, with the first player reaching 7.5 points emerging as the champion.

Now, back to why Game 6 was so special from Gukesh's perspective, regardless of the outcome. The game exposed the mentality of the two players. The 18-year-old Indian was adventurous and unrelenting, like a typical Gen Z. His opponent, the 32-year-old Chinese, behaved like a millennial planning to buy his first car. Cautious, pragmatic, overcalculating.

Conventional chess wisdom says that when the player with white pieces offers a draw in a seemingly even position, you don't second-guess. Just take it. Ding offered Gukesh a chance to take a draw by repeating a position three times between moves 23 and 26 when he shuffled his queen between the squares d5 and d6. Had Gukesh played along, the game would have ended in a timid draw. But Gukesh declined and moved his queen out wide to h4. 

The computer analysis indicated that Gukesh was making a mistake because Ding had a better pawn structure on his queenside. Ding kept following Gukesh for a queen exchange, which he again refused by swinging his queen onto the other side of the board. It was pretty much a cat-and-mouse game. 

If Gukesh was allowed to say something at that point, he might have said: "Come and get me."

While Ding was being pragmatic, he still had the superior position on the board after doubling his rooks. Gukesh had another problem: Time. Both players had 120 minutes each for their first 40 moves. Ding blitzed his first 20 moves under 7 minutes while Gukesh used up more than an hour to make the same number of moves. But on move 21 Ding had a deep think. He was unmoved for 42 minutes, the longest spent on a single move by either of them in the entire event. That almost levelled the two on time.

After 33 moves, when the queens were off the board, it seemed like Gukesh had a slight upper hand with his pawns on the kingside preparing for a long march. But in getting adventurous, he presented Ding with another chance to go for a threefold repetition. Ding being Ding, jumped on the opportunity. This time though, Gukesh sensibly accepted. 

Throughout the game, the Indian teenager showed that he was ready to battle; that he would decide his career-defining event on his terms. After a rest day, Game 7, with Gukesh playing white, will be played on Tuesday.