Ding Liren had seven seconds to go on his clock. Under such intense pressure, the move the reigning world champion made had a fair chance of being the incorrect choice. It was. Every evaluation engine now had Dommaraju Gukesh as the favourite to land a pivotal punch at the halfway mark in this slugfest of a world championship. Then came the moment.
Move 46.
Four-and-a-half hours after the players had begun playing. It was already their longest match of the world championship so far. Gukesh moved his bishop to d1. All the evaluations had changed. A big advantage had disappeared into a dead-even game. One moment was all it took, and perhaps all it will take over the next ten days. And it seemed like Gukesh knew.
It obviously wasn’t visible in his facial expressions, but his demeanour changed. The calm, stoic presence that was leaning back onto his chair and relaxing with closed eyes gave way to a jittery young man leaned over on top of the board, wondering how he had let it slip away. His usually famed calculation ability had just let him down momentarily, by not taking into consideration one possibility of a rook move from Ding.
Make no mistake, Gukesh’s advantage here in game 7 was significant. He was in such a better position that Ding later mentioned that he was close to giving up after Gukesh’s 44th move. He took 21 minutes to think in that position, and played a pawn push that seemed insignificant, but left the ball in Gukesh’s court to make the play and close out the win.
That, though, is the toughest thing to do in sport – to win. To close things out. Just as Ding didn’t in previous games, Gukesh couldn’t find a way to turn the advantage into a win. And so, we head into the back-half of this marathon Championship all level, just as we started ten days ago in Singapore.
It wasn’t a straightforward task anyway for Gukesh, but he threw away an opportunity by making that bishop move. He later termed it disappointing, and that it was a lesson that the most important thing is to convert good positions. The problem with advantages – however significant – in elite chess is that they just one misjudgment away from turning back against you. Gukesh was never in danger of losing, but after move 46, a win was never really in question, bar a blunder of the kind you never see at this level.
Now, of course, watching chess with an engine and an evaluation bar is easy. For the layperson, when the engine suggests a move, you wonder why elite players don’t just play it. Don’t they train with engines? Isn’t this what they are supposed to do? However, in that lonely environment of the glass enclosure they play in, all they have is their memory and the number of lines that they have studied and prepared for. Do you remember everything you’ve studied for during an exam? Now imagine that, only under considerably more pressure, with hundreds of watching eyes at the playing hall, and hundreds of thousands more on the internet.
Making real-time moves over the board where you calculate tons of possibilities over a short period of time sometimes means you just miss one little detail – it’s only human. These two maybe geniuses, but they are, after all, human. Gukesh showed us all just that by missing this little detail: Ding’s rook going to h3. He said he didn’t realise it was a possibility. Because sport by its very nature is a cruel beast, of course it was that very detail that could’ve pushed Gukesh on to a win.
After seven games, there’s probably been only one game in which neither player has really had the opportunity to push for a win. The chances are coming. Sooner or later, someone will have to take one, to assert their initiative in this match. If the chance is taken by either player, it lays down the gauntlet as we head closer to the end.
This isn’t like Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana from 2018 playing draw after draw in such a way that neither player won a single game of classical chess. Gukesh and Ding are trading opportunities. If one takes it, then the opportunity to heap psychological pressure on the other is immense. Pressure does funny things to players; it almost always leads to missed opportunities. Just as Gukesh learned in game 7, it doesn’t take much for a significant advantage to become level pegging.
Gukesh can now take solace from having out-prepared and outplayed Ding, but we’re still waiting for someone to land a clean punch. That nearly came in game 7, courtesy the challenger. In world championships, nearly is never enough, though, and it’s those little moments that turn nearly into enough, as Gukesh just found out on Tuesday evening.
