After two games each with black and white now, Dommaraju Gukesh certainly has come into his own after a nervous start in that opening game defeat in the 2024 FIDE World Championship. He will take encouragement from how he dealt with being surprised in openings in both games with black by reigning champion Ding Liren and reduced both to relatively harmless and solid positions.
The two games with black have been particularly impressive from Gukesh because a particular area of interest before this match was how the 18-year-old would fare in the openings. His two games with white have been driven by preparation, but the two games with black have shown his problem-solving ability, which has enabled him to create positions where he has faced no dangers.
This is an important attribute for any potential world champion — to be solid and not lose too many games. Magnus Carlsen was a master at it, and especially with black pieces, where there is potentially a big downside to overreaching in a position. If done at the wrong moment, a drab draw could easily become a loss.
Over 14 games, there are bound to be one or two that are drab and even boring. From Gukesh’s perspective, if they keep coming when he’s playing with black, thereby allowing him to take a few more risks with white, that would be the ideal scenario as this world championship really begins to take shape over this weekend in Singapore.
In this second game with black pieces on Friday, Gukesh had to deal with a bit of a surprise in the opening again but found solidity in the middle game to keep Ding at bay. Gukesh admitted after the match that even though he had seen the line Ding took in the opening before, he hadn’t really prepared for it, so it was down to him to find the solutions on the board… which he did.
Just as the players got out of the opening, there was a period where only three moves were played in the space of 45 minutes. At that point, Ding had a slight advantage according to the engine, but Gukesh found a couple of precise moves to nullify that and bring the game back to a dead-even position.
Gukesh said later that he would have liked to have pressed a bit more in the position, but it was such that there were no real dangers for either player, in a game that was destined for a draw way before both players agreed to it in move 42.
Perhaps the clearest indication of the way the game fizzled out into a draw without too many talking points was summed up by the array of questions at the post-game press conference – including Gukesh’s diet in the past few days and whether he believes in numerology or not.
But at the time, Gukesh wasn’t to know that the game would fizzle out like it did. It was a critical time for him, until he found the Ne5 move. Viswanathan Anand had told ESPN — when Gukesh was thinking about that move (which he did for more than 20 minutes) — that it could have developed into a dangerous position, with Ding having many easy moves to make at that point. However, after that move from Gukesh, Ding retreated with his knight, in what seemed to be a first admission that he would stop pushing for a victory.
The retreat was an interesting move particularly because Ding had remarked after game 3 that his aim would be to push further when he found himself in slightly advantageous positions with white, but once again, he couldn’t really find the advantage.
“I wanted to surprise my opponent with the opening,” Ding said. That aim was achieved, but Gukesh’s much-praised calculation ability came to the fore, as the young challenger found the required maneuvers to stay out of trouble and played out another draw that suits him down to the T at this point in the match.