World Chess Championship 2024, Game 10: Gukesh, Ding Liren register seventh consecutive draw

Who will blink first?

The question begs the answer still. The stalemate continues at the World Chess Championship.

Ding Liren and D. Gukesh drew their seventh game in a row at World Resorts Sentosa on Saturday. The score is tied at 5-5. Just four games remain in the classical format.  If it is a 7-7 draw, a tie-breaker of speed chess will have to be played.

With the stakes so high, and with so few games to be played, it wasn’t surprising to see both the men deciding to play it safe for the second game in a row. Games seven and eight were much sharper though they both were drawn.

But now, neither Ding nor Gukesh could afford a loss. It would be rather difficult to come back into the match.

AS IT HAPPENED | GUKESH VS DING GAME 10 HIGHLIGHTS

Gukesh may be the slightly happier of the two, as he managed to get a draw with black pieces, though he insisted that there wasn’t much of a difference these days between the colours. Both have two games with white.

In Game 9, the opening was London System, — not for the first time in this match.  That was a bit of a deviation from the theme here, as both the men have looked keen to try out different openings.

Another major theme was also missing. Ding has been behind the clock for most of the time in the opening phase of the games, but on this occasion, he had a lead over Gukesh. Not that it mattered much in a game that looked heading for a draw from early on.

The queens left the arena by the 14th move and, as former World No. 3 Anish Giri cryptically remarked, there were just one and a half moves between the opening and the end-game.

The ending had the same-coloured bishops, rooks and knight, with Gukesh saddled with doubled pawns, but that was no cause for even the faintest of headaches. All the pieces except those bishops were then traded off, and the game ended with a three-fold repetition, in 36 moves.

Shortly after the game, Gukesh said the cost of the game was higher than before. “But my approach and my goal are still the same – to play good games,” he said.

Ding said there was not much room to make mistakes. “We need to be careful with every move,” he said.

That was an understatement, in true Ding style.